Ebano

Book excerpt: Alberto Vzquez-Figueroa, the acclaimed popular novelist, has given us in Ebano a novel in his own tremendously realistic and almost cinematographic style. This time his novel is set in Africa, the main characters being a young European lecturer and his wife, an ebullient and idealistic black African who tries to bring to the attention of the Western world the miserable plight of her home country. While on honeymoon in Africa, she is abducted during one of her husband’s absences. So begins the young man’s odyssey to find his wife who, suffering great hardship, is taken to Arabia —to be sold to a sheik for a large sum of money.