"A daring post-colonial satire . . . It's a blistering skewering, and as
sharp as it is funny."--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by
Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen. An Israeli
professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a
slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring
successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But
before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with
Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house.
Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary
attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic
inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of
transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor's
passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he's secretly
writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the
slave trade?