Conville & Walsh
literary agency
True Murder
- Author: Yaba Badoe
- Category: Fiction Crime / Thriller Commercial Debut
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape (UK)
- Pub date: February 2009
- Length: 272 pages
About True Murder
An action-packed chiller steeped in the passions and the potential darkness of childhood
– TELEGRAPH
Badoe’s background as a documentary film-maker has honed her observational skills, fully utilised in the dextrously rounded characterisations
– INDEPENDENT
The intimacy and uncertainty of adolescence is strongly evoked
– GUARDIAN
TRUE MURDER is told from the viewpoint of 11 year old Ajuba, a young Ghanian girl who, due to incredibly difficult family circumstances, has been sent to an English boarding school in the lush Devon countryside.
Ajuba, although shy, appears to be coping well in her new life in England. Secretly, however, she longs for re-connection with her mother and a return to the certainties of her early childhood in Ghana. When she is asked to befriend the confident if brash “new girl”, Polly Venus, she finds herself inexorably drawn to the emotional security of being “best friends”, the beauty and comfort of a wellordered home and the potentially calming influence of English country life.
But all is not what it might seem in the Venus household, and haunted by the circumstances of her mother’s breakdown and the ghosts of her Ghanian heritage, Ajuba struggles to make sense of the glamorous but dysfunctional Venus family who are literally tearing each other apart in front of her. Fleetingly, Ajuba manages to help the family retain a nominal sense of equilibrium but when she and Polly discover the bones of two tiny babies in the attic of the Venus family home three tragedies conflate, with catastrophic results, and Ajuba finally has to come to terms with the horrifying realities of true murder.
About the Author
Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker and journalist. A graduate of King’s College Cambridge, she worked as a civil servant in Ghana before becoming a General Trainee with the BBC. She has taught in Spain and Jamaica and is, at present, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, where she is completing a documentary film. Her short stories have been published in Critical Quarterly and in African Love Stories (edited by Ama Ata Aidoo).