Black Moses: Longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize 2017

Description

It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But over at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of terror of Dieudonne Ngoulmoumako, the institution's corrupt director.

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. An award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in LA, where he teaches literature at UCLA. His four previous novels African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar and Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty - a fictionalised retelling of Mabanckou's childhood in Congo - are all published by Serpent's Tail, as is the memoir The Lights of Pointe-Noire, which won the 2016 French Voices Award. In 2015 Mabanckou was listed as a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.

Heartbreaking... Black Moses abounds with moments of black humor but the levity is balanced by Mabanckou's portrait of a dysfunctional society rent by corruption * The New York Times * Black Moses exhibits all the charm, warmth and verbal brio that have won the author of Broken Glass and African Psycho so many admirers - and the informal title of Africa's Samuel Beckett. Helen Stevenson, his translator, again shakes Mr Mabanckou's cocktail of sophistication and simplicity into richly idiomatic English * Economist * 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 2015, judges' citation Africa's Samuel Beckett ... one of the continent's greatest living writers * Guardian * A Congolese rewriting and reimagining of Dickens * Scotsman *