National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A New York Times Notable Book Best Book of the Year for The Washington Post The New Yorker Time The Atlantic Los Angeles Times Harper Bazaar Vulture Town Country San Francisco Chronicle Christian Science Monitor Mother Jones Barack Obama A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick Impossible to put down. Each lyrical line sings and soars, freeing the reader as it did the writer. People With echoes of Educated and The Glass Castle, How to Say Babylon is a lushly observed and keenly reflective chronicle The Washington Post, brilliantly recounting the author struggle to break free her rigid religious upbringing and navigate the world on her own terms. Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman highest virtue was her obedience. Safiya extraordinary mother, though loyal to her father, gave her the one gift she knew would take Safiya beyond the stretch of beach and mountains in Jamaica