You can read a new great review of John Self from The Observer for my novel “Our Lady Of nile” (translated by Melanie Mauthner).
My book is out now on Daunt Books my publisher in UK.
“…(a) surprisingly bright, light-touch debut”
But bubbling under, then boiling over, is the ethnic division between Hutu and Tutsi, which in 1994 led to the slaughter of more than half a million Tutsi in three months. Mukasonga, a Tutsi, was exiled from Rwanda before settling in France in 1992; 37 members of her family were killed in the genocide. It’s little wonder that her early books focus on this, but the wonder of Our Lady of the Nile is in its bright, light touch… The drama that ends the book, when the threat to “de-Tutsify our schools” is realised, is a foreshock of violence to come. We hear the rumble of what Mukasonga in her memoir, Cockroaches, calls “the machinery of the genocide”. Thanks to Mukasonga, who has been tipped for the Nobel prize in literature for her ability to make art from bearing witness, we are hearing its echoes still.
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