"Stunningly realized . . . Exquisite . . . A spellbinding novel about the high price of betrayal-of others, and oneself." -Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize
The hotly anticipated new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize.
Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman's name: Maram.
The key to this mysterious woman's identity is Adanson's unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée-a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade-to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart.
Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop's Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal's oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.
Sprache
Produkt-Hinweis
Fadenheftung
Gewebe-Einband
mit Schutzumschlag
Maße
Höhe: 214 mm
Breite: 144 mm
Dicke: 23 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-374-60677-0 (9780374606770)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
David Diop was born in Paris and was raised in Senegal. He is the head of the Arts, Languages, and Literature Department at the University of Pau, where his research includes such topics as eighteenth-century French literature and European representations of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His second novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, was awarded the International Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction.
