Despite being on the other side of the world in Hong Kong, overlooking a marina shrouded in a cool fog, Asale Angel-Ajani says her nostalgia for the place she once called home was at the forefront of her mind while writing her debut novel.
“When I sat down to write, I couldn’t stay away from the landscape of my childhood,” Angel-Ajani said in a recent phone interview from New York, where she’s a professor at City College of New York. “I thought I would never want to go back, but it was the place that kept calling me.”
The author, who spent a decade in Hong Kong, yearned for the desert heat and San Bernardino mountains, and these would become the backdrop and inspiration for her debut novel, "A Country You Can Leave."
