Aftershocks was selected as a best book of 2021 by Vulture, Amazon, Time, Esquire, NPR, the Guardian, Vogue, Electric Literature, and others.
Aftershocks was included on British Vogue’s “Absolute Best Summer Reads for 2021” list.
“Earthquakes are a metaphor for psychological struggles, family ruptures, and centuries of diasporic and colonial history in this ambitious memoir.”
“A gorgeous and unsettling memoir.”
Podcast.
As the daughter of UN diplomat, Nadia Owusu grows up straddling several worlds. Trailing her father from Africa to Europe before moving to the United States for university, Nadia grapples with her fractured identity. But when Nadia returns to her father’s village in Ghana, she finds an unexpected and affirming answer to who she is.
Interview.
“I have a U.S. passport because of my mother, but I didn’t spend any real time in the U.S. except for a few summers as a kid. There was a lot that I had to learn about this new place I was living in, including what it meant to be Black in America. I’ve been Black my whole life, but I think being Black in America is a very different thing. I had lived in Europe, so anti-Black racism was not new to me, but the way that it is built into everything here was very different for me.”--Believer Magazine
Interview.
“I want to understand how people belong to a place, how they make homes for themselves, how broader forces impact our lives and are playing out in our private moments. Politics, war, and pandemics.”--Los Angeles Times
Interview.
“In some ways, I was trying to write my way back to the main lessons that he instilled in me.”--Vogue
Radio Interview.
“I think it's a very self-centered thing that I thought I - in my story of my father, that I was the most important person in his whole world and that he couldn't possibly have had a life outside of the life that he had with me.”--Weekend Edition with Scott Simon
Interview.
“The uprisings for Black lives and the clear pro-Black stance that people are taking—is an act of revision and correction against the stories, which, whether we like it or not, are in the groundwater, and everyone white and Black have been drinking our entire lives.”--Electric Literature
“In [Owusu’s] capable writing, stories become nearly tangible objects she holds to the light, turns over and over, eager to discover a never before glimpsed sparkle or a surprising divot in their familiar shapes.”—NPR
“It takes a skillful hand to weave complex concepts so seamlessly into a narrative, and Owusu executes this masterfully. By relating the events of her upbringing, she is also telling the story of her father and the history of the countries that had become home to her. Whether it’s coming to understand her sexuality or examining herself through the lens of race, Owusu takes the reader deeply through her thoughts and experiences.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“This is a seismic reimagining of what a memoir can look like, structurally and stylistically, and its tremors linger long after the book is finished.”—Washington Post Books
Radio Interview.
Nadia Owusu was raised around the globe, living with her Ghanaian father, a civil servant with the United Nations.—All Of It With Alison Stewart, WNYC
Interview.
“I was grateful for the beauty and for the reminders that there are seasons; that things change gradually and also suddenly.”—Catapult
Feature.
“Love is an active thing”—Porter
What people are saying about Aftershocks.
“Nadia Owusu's Aftershocks bleeds honesty. It is a majestically rendered telling of all the history, hurt and love a body can contain. A wonderful work of art made of so many stories and histories it is bursting with both harshness and perseverance. An incredible debut.”
— NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, author of New York Times bestseller Friday Black
"Aftershocks is a triptych feat of style: the lucid language, the masterful handling of time, the brilliance of its seismic theme. It’s also an astute exploration of the long legacy of colonialism. Owusu is a product of that political and cultural collision, and one of the great gifts of this compelling memoir is the moving narrative of her reconciling that identity. And if that weren’t enough, Aftershocks is an indelible portrait of Owusu’s resilience in the face of almost unfathomable familial trauma as well as her immortal love for her father."
— MITCHELL S. JACKSON, author of Survival Math
“Nadia Owusu has lived multiple lives and each has demanded much of her. She has met and surpassed those demands with her memoir, Aftershocks. Owusu is half-Armenian, half-Ghanaian; socially privileged and psychologically wounded. She spends her life moving between Europe, Africa and New York, reeling from her mother’s desertion and her father’s death. Her task and burden are threefold: to chronicle the historical wounds and legacies of each country; to chart her own descent into grief, mania and madness; to begin the work of emotional reconstruction. She does so with unerring honesty and in prose that is both rigorous and luminous.”
— MARGO JEFFERSON, author of Negroland: A Memoir, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
“Aftershocks is more than just a book—it is delicate, intricate choreography. This memoir is a testimony to how certain books and writers can tell you their story in a way that mirrors your own. Even if the facts of that story are different, the emotion is familiar. Owusu is that writer. She has created a book full of shared emotional memories and I wanted to sit in those memories with her for as long as I could. Nadia Owusu is powerful, beautiful, poetic, and Aftershocks is a testimony to her commitment to constructing towering, lovingly-rendered sentences. Quite simply, Aftershocks is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.”
—BASSEY IKPI, New York Times bestselling author of I'm Lying but I'm telling the Truth
“Billed as a memoir, Owusu’s book is so much more: a history of Africa’s relationship with the West, a clear-eyed depiction of the ties that bind — and the grievances that disconnect — Black people around the world, and an analysis of how broken families produce broken human beings. But it’s Owusu’s life story that will burrow into you. She is the product of a union between a proud Ghanaian man and a hopeful Armenian American woman who perceive their relationship as an expression of intimate love and grand idealism. Owusu relies on the language of earthquakes — foreshock, mainshock, aftershock — to describe what happens to her and her family once her parents’ marriage breaks apart. This is a book that will shake you to your core.” —Tope Folarin in New York Magazine
"Owusu devotes a portion of this memoir to surveying the ruptured histories of the many countries she's connected to, but it's her striking personal story and charged language that makes Aftershocks compelling. [L]yrical...[A] well-wrought, often powerful memoir."—Maureen Corrigan, FRESH AIR
“Full of narrative risk and untrammeled lyricism, [Aftershocks] fulfills the grieving author’s directive to herself: to construct a story that reconstructs her world.”—The Washington Post
“Aftershocks offers an incisive and tender reminder that life does not take place in neat categories, no matter where you are from. We are many-sided and infinitely malleable, and all the better for it.—The Guardian
"Aftershocks is deeply intimate, heartbreakingly honest, and a book that will likely reverberate throughout our hearts and minds long after we’ve finished reading."—LITHUB
“Aftershocks is a stunning, visceral book about the ways that our stories—of loss, of love, of borders—leave permanent marks on our bodies and minds”—Booklist
“Powerfully and poetically told, Owusu’s remarkable story chronicles the lasting legacies of grief and trauma, as well the thorny, non-linear journey of healing”—Esquire’s 26 Best Books of 2021 (So Far)
"Whiting Award-winner Owusu recounts her past through the metaphor of earthquakes, with a memoir that broods on lost identity and statelessness."—ELLE (UK)
“[Owusu] dispatches all of this heartache with blistering honesty, but does so with prose light enough that it never feels too much to bear.”—Entertainment Weekly
"In her searing debut memoir, Owusu analyzes her shaky sense of belonging and identity as she reflects on her fractured family unit and upbringing."—TIME
“This is a magnificent, complex assessment of selfhood and why it matters.”—Elle
“Owusu captures how she is ‘read’ in different places with unflinching clarity.”—the Financial Times
“Aftershocks” offers an incredible account of a life both privileged and fraught, and a rigorous accounting of living as heir and stranger to so many histories, voices and identities.”—San Francisco Chronicle
These Six Women Prove That Now is the Time for Creativity-Vogue Magazine Feature
“Aftershocks is an intimate work told in an imaginative style, with the events that shaped its author rippling throughout her nonlinear story. The structure mimics the all-consuming effect that a moment--a personal earthquake--can have on a life.”– Bookpage
“There is something fairy tale–like about Owusu’s story, an orphan-like existence of struggle and survival, but there is no fairy godmother who rescues this heroine—just a growing sense of self-awareness to orient her in a troubling world.”-Vogue
“Powerful and devastating — and a reminder that usually the only hero any of us have is ourselves — Nadia Owusu's memoir Aftershocks is a fascinating exploration of the difficulties inherent to growing up and going between different cultures, never knowing if you belong everywhere or nowhere.”-Refinery29
“To call Aftershocks an “origin story” is too simplistic. As a third-culture kid split between nations and identities (“Ghanaian-Armenian-American” doesn’t even begin to cover it), Owusu recounts not only the physical landscape of her life, but also its emotional terrain. From her absent mother’s reappearances, to her beloved father’s death, to familial revelations that shake her to her core, she envisions past experiences as earthquakes—the moments in her life when she felt as if the planet itself ruptured. What else to do but to measure their magnitudes, to study what came before, and what may come after?”
—Matt Ortile for Book of the Month
"Enthralling...readers will be moved by this well-wrought memoir."
“In beautifully written prose, she embarks on a journey to find her identity and a place to plant her roots, after many years marked by abandonment and loss.”
"Aftershocks is the intimate, deeply moving memoir about where [Owusu] came from and how she found herself."—HELLOGIGGLES
"A poetic coming-of-age story, Nadia Owusu's Aftershocks thoroughly scrambles the usual genre classifications, combining memoir with cultural history and contemporary resonance.”
—GOODREADS Editors
“By day, Nadia Owusu works in urban planning and policy, incorporating issues of environmental justice into cityscapes and conservation proposals. In her off time, she writes, marvelously, about grief—grief for her parents (she was abandoned by her Armenian American mother, and her Ghanian father died when she was young), for places (she has bounced around the globe, among various family members), and for the natural world, so revered by her ancestors and so denigrated by our modern-day obsession with growth.”—Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club
"'I have lived in disaster, and disaster has lived in me,' writes one of the literary world's most promising new voices, Nadia Owusu, in this astonishing memoir. After her mother left and her father died, Owusu became a woman of many homelands and identities: she grew up in many countries including Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda, Italy, and the UK. [Aftershocks] is Owusu's account of hauling herself out of the wreckage; an intimate look behind the division of today's world."-RED (UK)
“An engaging and reflective new memoir focused on universal themes of home, abandonment, identity and autonomy.”-Ms. Magazine
"This extraordinary memoir is a seismic tale of unravelling her sense of self from a tangle of different languages and homelands. Owusu is a writer to watch."
-Bookseller (UK), Editor’s Choice