Dreams From My Father

Before Barack Obama became a politician he was, among other things, a writer. Dreams From My Father is his masterpiece: a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking the big questions about identity and belonging. The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama recounts an emotional odyssey. He retraces the migration of his mother's family from Kansas to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father's life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

'Dreams From My Father is a remarkable story...a journey of heart and mind into a family maelstrom of identity, class and race...in a literary tradition of political prose that goes back to another master of the American language: Abraham Lincoln.' Robert McCrum, Guardian