A Song Flung Up to Heaven

A memoir of politics and activism, from the bestselling and beloved author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

''A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman'' BARACK OBAMA

It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenage son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that''s where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period. She writes of Jimmy Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and of friends and family, and finishes with the beginnings of her career as one of America''s most impressive memoir writers.

''She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds'' OPRAH WINFREY

''She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate'' TONI MORRISON