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How to Say Babylon: A Memoir Audiobook
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National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
A New York Times Notable Book
Best Book of the Year for The Washington Post* The New Yorker * Time * The Atlantic * Los Angeles Times * NPR * Harper’s Bazaar * Vulture * Town & Country * San Francisco Chronicle * Christian Science Monitor * Mother Jones * Barack Obama
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick
“Impossible to put down...Each lyrical line sings and soars, freeing the reader as it did the writer.” —People
With echoes of Educated and The Glass Castle, How to Say Babylon is a “lushly observed and keenly reflective chronicle” (The Washington Post), brilliantly recounting the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid religious upbringing and navigate the world on her own terms.
Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.
Safiya’s extraordinary mother, though loyal to her father, gave her the one gift she knew would take Safiya beyond the stretch of beach and mountains in Jamaica their family called home: a world of books, knowledge, and education she conjured almost out of thin air. When she introduced Safiya to poetry, Safiya’s voice awakened. As she watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under relentless domesticity, Safiya’s rebellion against her father’s rules set her on an inevitable collision course with him. Her education became the sharp tool to hone her own poetic voice and carve her path to liberation. Rich in emotion and page-turning drama, How to Say Babylon is “a melodious wave of memories” of a woman finding her own power (NPR).
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“Author/narrator Safiya Sinclair emphasizes the poetry of her words as she narrates her memoir. Her soft Jamaican accent sounds like gentle waves…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
Quotes
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“It’s impossible to put down Sinclair’s searing memoir.”
— People -
“There were numerous attempts to silence her, but Safiya Sinclair came out on the other side, victorious against patriarchy and colonialization.”
— NPR.org -
“More than catharsis; this is memoir as liberation.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Awards
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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An AudioFile Best Audiobook of the Year
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A Today Show Read with Jenna Pick
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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
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A Time Magazine Best Book of 2023
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A Washington Post Best Book of 2023
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On Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Year List
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An Esquire Magazine Best Book of the Year
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Finalist for the 2023 Kirkus Prize
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Longlisted for the Women's Prize
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About Safiya Sinclair
Safiya Sinclair is the author of the highly acclaimed poetry collection Cannibal. It won a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year. Cannibal was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Dylan Thomas Prize. She was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica.