A few years ago I read Aminatta Forna’s exceptionally beautiful novel The Memory of Love and was really excited to read some of her non-fiction work. The Window Seat definitely did not disappoint! It is a collection of previously published, and a few new, essays that the author has penned over the years, threaded together by the themes of travel and migration. If you know me they are also themes that tie my own life together, so there were many areas in this collection where I found myself nodding my head, and moments that I related to in ways that sometimes brought me to tears.

Aminatta Forna’s beautiful prose translates well into non-fiction, and her essays teach us and take us places, all the while remaining very personal and close to the heart. I love how she uses animals metaphorically ( I like to think that I am a puffin, but maybe I have become a robin, I’m not sure anymore), and how she turns a simple trip into a story in which the reader feels they are intimately involved. I also really love how she manages to take a story and her own observations and weave them together to provide acute and important overviews on tough topics like institutionalized racism, civil war, and slavery.

I personally loved the essay describing her trip to the Shetland Islands with her mother and brother, discovering her ancestral grounds), and it made me think about how I yearn to visit the Hebrides to find mine. And of course, all of the references to “home” and how that does not mean the same thing to people like her (or me) that it does to others. “Where is home?” is such a loaded question to me, and I love reading works by other people who have traveled so much and lived in so many different places from such an early age. 

All in all this is just a beautiful collection of essays, and I would highly recommend it!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.