The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood

Journalist Helene Cooper delivers a compelling memoir living in Liberia, escaping to America, and eventually returning to the land of her childhood.Descended from freed American slaves who sailed to Africa in 1820, Helene is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful family of dynastic aristocrats. On her 14th birthday, her uncle, Liberia's minister of foreign affairs, is executed in a military coup. Helene's family and others of their class are thrust into a boiling cauldron of political and civil strife. As successive regimes come and go accompanied by wave after wave of bloodshed, the family barely manages to flee. Settling in America, Helene begins a new life and successful career as a journalist before making the fateful decision to revisit her homeland years later.