Elaine Orr, a professor in the department of English, published her first book A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa, earlier this April. It chronicles a young women’s journey from Georgia to the community of the Yoruba people in Nigeria. The story is particularly close to home for Orr, as she also grew up among the Yoruba people.

Orr said the memories of her childhood life in Nigeria with her missionary parents paved the way for the story.

“One of my Nigerian names in Yoruba was Bamidele,” Orr said. “It means ‘Come home with me.’ I always want my readers to follow me home-—to come home with me.”

In the book, the main character, Emma, takes the adventure and challenge of a lifetime by traveling to Nigeria to be a missionary in the mid-1800s. 

“It is an odyssey on many levels,” Orr said. “Physical, spiritual, marital, international.”

As Emma leaves her sheltered life at a women’s college in Georgia and embarks on this journey, she discovers things about herself that transform her and awaken her to the realities of life outside of the United States. 

“She has witnessed the slave trade in the U.S but doesn’t know what it looks like on the other side,” Orr said. 

Religion is also an important theme of the novel, and through the book, Orr explored how religion can bring together people of all origins.

“One of my hopes is that the reader will see the world and our history, the history of the United States and transatlantic history, in a fuller way,” Orr said. “Not in a way that you would learn in a history book, but in empathy with characters.”

Although she is a professor of English, Orr said writing her first novel was still a challenge. According to Orr, novel writing is about as related to reading novels as studying architecture is to building structures. 

“You study buildings from the outside, looking through rooms, halls and cornices and that is like reading,” Orr said. “Writing is like tearing out the sheetrock and seeing how the wall was built. It is looking at everything that reading the novel isn’t necessarily supposed to show.”

Understanding the complexities and histories of all her characters, as well as formulating empathy for those characters, were all part of Orr’s learning experience. 

“As a writer, it expanded me hugely,” Orr said. “I think in order to write fiction, one has to learn great empathy for your characters, even the ones that don’t seem very admirable. You must understand them and why they are behaving why they are. It allowed me to practice greater empathy in my fiction.”

As Orr follows Emma’s journey, she introduces readers not only to the history of Nigeria but also to her own history. Through Emma’s eyes, the reader can sees Orr’s own voyages through the United States and Africa. 

“It is always my hope to show the light in Africa, not the darkness,” Orr said. “The title A Different Sun puts a different emphasis on light in Africa.”