From Goncourt Prize finalist a beautiful and brilliant new novel. With a nod to Samuel Beckett and Bohumil Hrabal, a young dramatist from a West African nation describes a student protest against a brutal oligarchy and its crushing aftermath. While distributing leaflets with provocative quotations from Beckett, Ito Baraka is taken to a camp where torture, starvation, beatings, and rape are normal. Forced to inform on his friends, whose fates he now fears, and released a broken man, he is enabled to escape to Quebec. His one goal is to tell the story of the protest and pay homage to Koli Lem, a teacher, cellmate, and lover of books, who was blinded by being forced to look at the sun--and is surely a symbol of the nation. Edem Awumey gives us a darkly moving and terrifying novel about fear and play, repression and protest, and the indomitable nature of creativity.
Language
Place of publication
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 221 mm
Width: 143 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-1-988449-16-6 (9781988449166)
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Schweitzer Classification
Edem Awumey was born in Lomé, Togo. He is the author of five previous novels. Descent into Night, the English translation of Explication de la nuit (2013), won the prestigious Governor General's Literary Award for Translation in 2018. His other novels are Port-Melo (2006), which won the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire; Les pieds sales (2009), which was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt in France; Rose déluge (2011); and Mina parmi les ombres (2018), which was translated into English as Mina Among the Shadows (2020). Dirty Feet (2011), the English translation of Les pieds sales, was selected for the Dublin Impac Award. Descent into Night and Mina Among the Shadows were translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott. Edem Awumey lives in Gatineau, Quebec.
