Audrey Thomas followed her husband to Ghana where they lived from 1964 to 1966. There she wrote her first published story, "If One Green Bottle..."; describing a confinement and miscarriage in a Ghana hospital. It won an award for debut fiction from the Atlantic Monthly and served as the basis for her first novel Mrs. Blood (1970). Later her Blown Figures (1974), set in Ghana, reputedly used Africa as a metaphor for the unconscious.

During a vacation in 1965, Thomas and her husband visited the remains of the Elmira and Cape Coast Castle slave-supply hubs, now both World Heritage Sites. There she saw the graves of the Cape Coast Castle manager George Maclean and his bride Letitia Landon, formerly a respected English author before her mysterious death. Thomas has brilliantly imagined the life of the transplanted authoress from 1836 to late 1838, in both London and at Cape Coast, for a stunning new novel for adults, Local Customs (Dundurn $16.99).

As the homeland of her father, ghana also figures into Esi Edugyan's 48-page Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home (University of Alberta $10.95), which is derived from the Henry Kreisel Lecture Series. "Home, for me, was not a birthright,"; she writes, "but an invention."; 978-1459707986;