A poignant and riotous tale of family and revolution in postcolonial
Africa, from the winner of the French Voices grand prize and finalist
for the Man Booker International Prize
Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo's southwestern coast, is
host to Alain Mabanckou's astonishing cycle of novels that is already
being hailed as one of the grandest, funniest fictional projects of our
time. His novels have been twice short-listed for the Man Booker
International Prize and have been described as beautiful (Salman
Rushdie), brutally satiric (Uzodinma Iweala), containing fireworks on
every page (Los Angeles Review of Books), and vividly colloquial,
mischievous and outrageous (Marina Warner) .
Mabanckou's riotous new novel, The Death of Comrade President, returns
to the 1970s milieu of his awarding-winning novel Black Moses, telling
the story of Michel, a daydreamer whose life is completely overthrown
when, in March 1977, just before the arrival of the rainy season,
Congo's Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered. Thanks to
his mother's kinship with the president, not even naive Michel can
remain untouched. And if he is to protect his family, Michel must learn
to lie.
Moving seamlessly between the small-scale worries of everyday life and
the grand tragedy of postcolonial politics, Mabanckou explores the
nuances of the human soul through the naive perspective of a boy who
learns the realities of life--and how much must change for everything to
stay the same.
