Dealing with the Dead

Reviews / Votes

A sharp and entertaining addition to Alain Mabanckou's broader portrayal of Pointe-Noire's historical complexities * Times Literary Supplement * Funny, spooky and surreal, this shapeshifting novel is at once serious and comic, spooky and cheerful, grave and bitter, erudite, gossipy, moralising and excoriating * Guardian * We should all be reading Alain Mabanckou right now. His brilliantly imaginative novels throw a rope across borders and between people. A glorious, funny, surreal novel, set in communist Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s. -- Alex Preston * Financial Times * Mabanckou interweaves horror and gallows humour to great effect, the shifts in tone are beautifully controlled, and his prose is rendered into exquisite English by Stevenson * Guardian * Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect. -- Man Booker International Prize judges' citation Mabanckou's satire is as biting as writers from Armando Iannucci to Paul Beatty. Dealing with the Dead is a rewarding, humorously dark read * Buzz Magazine * Mabanckou presents us with a sexy, pulsating city while mining deadpan comedy from its superstitions and its corrupt clerical and political elite * Telegraph * This is writing that literally and figuratively reshapes you, revealing spatial and emotional dimensions that are both all too foreign and all too familiar. Mabanckou infuses his novel with the macabre to move, unnerve, and unexpectedly delight -- 5-star review * The Skinny * Exuberant ... Dealing with the Dead is often damning, frequently hilarious and always compassionate. At just 200 pages, Helen Stevenson's translation from the French performs supple shifts between registers and keeps the story moving at lightning pace. It's the work of a writer who, in exile, has poured his indignation and longing for home into a novel that transports his readers there and immerses us in its complexities * Financial Times * Mabanckou sketches the eccentric cast of local characters, living and dead, with satirical wit and loving detail * Daily Mirror *