Fontana, London, 1959, 1^st pr thus.  # 353.  Vintage MMPB, 159 pages.  Wraps show some edge wear, impressions and creases; deep impression on rear wrap has caused impressions on last few pages.  Binding sound; interior clean and unmarked with tanned pages.  Translated by James Kirkup.  ‘This is the autobiography of Camara Laye, a young negro from French West Africa, who was brought up in a world of good and evil spirits which he accepted as facts and which he can still neither explain nor altogether deny.  A child of great intellectual promise, he went to the technical college at Conakry, the capital of French Guinea, and from there to France.  In Paris he found a completely different culture and when his money ran out he worked in a vast car factory.  Lonely and unhappy, he began to put on paper in straightforward, unembellished but sensitive prose – the memoirs of his African childhood.  This book which resulted was at once recognized as a work of art, showing the impact of European ideas on a man of high intelligence brought up in a vastly different community.’ (from rear wrap)