Synopsis "The Death of Comrade President (in English)"
A poignant and riotous tale of family and revolution in postcolonial Africa, from the winner of the French Voices grand prize and finalist for the Man Booker International PrizePointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo&;s southwestern coast, is host to Alain Mabanckou&;s astonishing cycle of novels that is already being hailed as one of the grandest, funniest fictional projects of our time. His novels have been twice short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize and have been described as &;beautiful&; (Salman Rushdie), &;brutally satiric&; (Uzodinma Iweala), containing &;fireworks on every page&; (Los Angeles Review of Books), and &;vividly colloquial, mischievous and outrageous&; (Marina Warner) .Mabanckou&;s riotous new novel, The Death of Comrade President, returns to the 1970s milieu of his awarding-winning novel Black Moses, telling the story of Michel, a daydreamer whose life is completely overthrown when, in March 1977, just before the arrival of the rainy season, Congo&;s Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered. Thanks to his mother&;s kinship with the president, not even naive Michel can remain untouched. And if he is to protect his family, Michel must learn to lie.Moving seamlessly between the small-scale worries of everyday life and the grand tragedy of postcolonial politics, Mabanckou explores the nuances of the human soul through the naive perspective of a boy who learns the realities of life&;and how much must change for everything to stay the same.
