The Dancing Tortoise

About the Book

The DANCING TORTOISE is a cautionary tale based on one clear lesson that love like any vital area of our lives is a warfront where one is completely to blame and none is wholly innocent. The book explores in a most remarkable way the complex web of relationships that bind a modern family to its immediate peasant origins. It is a story of family ties, arranged marriage, social climbing and middle class pretensions superbly woven into a wonderful tapestry of extra-marital affairs and wife-abuse which lead almost to the destruction of a young family.

About the Author

Naaotua Swayne a talented and prolific novelist was born in Ghana in 1959. After school she worked with the Geological Survery Department for 4 years. In 1980, Naaotua travelled to Nigeria and worked with an Advertising Company for 2 years. In 1982 she visited her brother in Britain, then 2  years after she met and married an English classical music composer. It was in 1986 that she wrote her first novel THE DANCING TORTOISE in six weeks. The novel is about an arranged marriage. Naaotua Swayne returned to Ghana in 1990. In 1995  the novel was published by Afram Publishers, that same year the book won the famous VALCO TRUST AWARD. The following year  she wrote her second novel INNOCENCE. This novel is about teenage pregnancy, and her third novel A WORLD APART is about relationship set on two continents. That same year she had her first child, and two more the following two years. In the year 2002, THE DANCING TORTOISE won the prestigious Ghana Book Award. Naaotua Swayne is an executive member of the Ghana Association of Writers and also a queen mother. Now divorced, Naaotua Swayne returned to Britain with her three children and lives in Harrow-On-The-Hill.