**"**The Eternal Audience of One is laugh-out-loud funny with
writing that is sometimes so beautiful that it dances off the page--to a
millennial beat--in perfect tempo with its tales of migration, love,
loss, and friendship." --Sarah Ladipo Manyika, author of In
Dependence
Reminiscent of Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon, this "gorgeous,
wildly funny, and, above all, profoundly moving and humane" (Peter
Orner, author of Am I Alone Here**)** coming-of-age tale
follows a young man who is forced to flee his homeland of Rwanda
during the Civil War and make sense of his reality.
Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in
it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work toward
some kind of ending.
One might as well start with Séraphin: playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid,
self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in
Windhoek, Namibia. Soon he will leave the confines of his family life
for the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, in South Africa, where loyal
friends, hormone-saturated parties, adventurous conquests, and race
controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law
school promises to deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan
immigrant: a degree from a prestigious university.
But a year is more than the sum of its parts, and en route to the
future, the present must be lived through and even the past must be
survived.
From one of Africa's emerging literary voices comes a lyrical and
piquant tale of family, migration, friendship, war, identity, and race
following the intersecting lives of Séraphin and a host of eclectic
characters from pre- and post-1994 Rwanda, colonial and
post-independence Windhoek, Paris and Brussels in the 70s, Nairobi
public schools, and the racially charged streets of Cape Town.
