A dazzling meditation on home-coming and belonging from one of
"Africa's greatest writers" and the Man Booker International Prize
finalist (The Guardian).
Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to
return until a quarter of a century later. When he finally came back to
Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on the Congo's southwestern coast, he
found a country that in some ways had changed beyond recognition: The
cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture
had become a Pentecostal church, and his secondary school has been
renamed in honor of a previously despised colonial ruler.
But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of
Congolese culture that still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Now
a decorated writer and an esteemed professor at UCLA, Mabanckou finds he
can only look on as an outsider in the place where he grew up. As he
delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother, and
into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to
the Republic of the Congo, his work recalls the writing of V. S. Naipaul
and André Aciman, offering a startlingly fresh perspective on the pain
of exile, the ghosts of memory, and the paths we take back home.
Grand Prize Winner at the 2015 French Voices Awards
"This is a beautiful book, the past hauntingly reentered, the present
truthfully faced, and the translation rises gorgeously to the
challenge." --Salman Rushdie
"A tender, poetic chronicle of an exile's return." --Kirkus Reviews
