Ahmed's Revenge: A Novel

by Richard Wiley, Richard Wiley, Cleo Qian

The people in Richard Wiley's fiction live in the dangerous territory where cultures and worlds collide. In Soldiers in Hiding, for which Richard Wiley won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best American... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679457445
• ISBN13: 9780679457442
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Ahmed's Revenge...

Wiley escapes limited genre assignments with this novel which embraces so many themes. It is entertaining and surprisingly humorous in areas; it touches on class,race,and gender issues. His success is in crafting an intricate and engaging story which races the audience through political and social commentary that is subtle, and so more effective. The language is often beautiful and the backdrop is sensual. This is literature that offers a counter-history in the form of a personal memoir. I loved it; I read it in one day.

More Elephants in "Ahmed's Revenge"

Richard Wiley's "Ahmed's Revenge" is a curiously interesting book. I have liked all of Wiley's novels; this one is the most puzzling. We are dealing with situations and characters that are unfamiliar that Wiley has rendered as both familiar and exotic. I read this one with my forehead furrowed, trying to work out all the problems and complications it occasioned in my weary brain. The quiet tone and unexpected imagery has a bit of a pleasant hypnotic effect. It's a curious book, and you ought to look at it yourself and add a book review of your responses so I can read them too. My primary suggestion for the author is to add more elephants. And more digging.

Entertaining, panoramic novel of Kenya's illegal ivory trade

Richard Wiley's novel about a young British widow caught in Kenya's illegal ivory trade is beautifully rendered. His fifth novel, Wiley's hallmarks of unusually graceful prose and a narrative style driven by eccentric characters from different parts of the world who are drawn together by mutual dependence and everyday happenstance are gloriously present in this tale of intrigue and cultural collision. Nora Grant is a lifelong British resident of Kenya in her early thirties, living on and running a coffee farm with her husband, Jules. She is shocked to discover his involvement in the illegal trade of elephant tusks. But before she summons the will to confront him, Jules is severely injured in a shooting accident. When he dies mysteriously while in hospital, Nora resolves to get to the root of his illicit legacy. She does so with the aid of her increasingly senile father; her father's best friend, an elderly and detached physician; a down-at-the-heels city detective, dedicated and insightful, yet curiously incapable of a normal conversational greeting ("Jambo Mama and Daddy."); and a beautiful African opera singer preparing for her role in Madame Butterfly. The story line is filled with unexpected turns taken by flawed heroes and not-so-evil villains, colorfully fleshed out by this one-time expatriate author, who lived and worked in Kenya, as well as several other countries. Through it all is the lakewater clear quality of Wiley's prose, exempified in passages like this one, as Nora reflects on the nature of her relationship with Jules. "...it was nevertheless I who fell in love first and hardest, I who most clearly heard that inner whisper telling me that Jules was the one. I believe now that Jules loved me during his life, ...but he loved the idea of Africa, the idea of high savannah, of elephants on the open range, at least as well."