FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED FICTION
‘Stunningly realized… A spellbinding novel’ MAAZA MENGISTE, Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Shadow King
‘Diop has opened a new way of thinking about the eighteenth century and its hideous cruelties’ ABDULRAZAK GURNAH, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
‘A compelling romantic adventure… Through an act of remembrance, Diop seeks to build a repository of lives and histories lost to the slave trade’ FINANCIAL TIMES
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The captivating new novel from David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize
Paris, 1806. Michel Adanson is dying. The last word to escape his lips is a woman's name: Maram. Who was she? Why, in the course of his long life, has he never spoken of her before?
As Adanson's daughter sorts through his things, she discovers a notebook. It reveals a secret history both fantastical and terrible, of his time as a young botanist travelling in Senegal.
How Adanson first heard of the 'revenant': a young woman of noble birth, abducted and sold into slavery across the seas, who then did the impossible-she came back, to live in hiding.
How he became obsessed with finding her, embarking on an odyssey that would lead to danger and destruction.
How a man who longed to solve the mysteries of nature instead found himself faced with the uncontrollable impulses of the human heart.
Tragic and tender, alive with feeling, this is a story of adventure, revenge and impossible desires, one which subverts our every expectation about who we are and who we love.
About the author
David Diop was born in Paris in 1966 and grew up in Senegal. He now lives in France, where he is a professor of eighteenth century literature at the University of Pau. David's second novel, At Night All Blood is Black, has been translated into more than 30 languages, winning the International Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Prize, as well as major prizes in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland and was chosen by Barack Obama as one of his summer reads. Beyond the Door of No Return was longlisted for the Goncourt Prize in France.
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