Alain Mabanckou
Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo-Brazzaville (French Congo). He currently resides in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA, having previously spent four years at the University of Michigan. Mabanckou will be a Fellow in the Humanities Council at Princeton University in 2007-2008. One of Francophone Africa's most prolific contemporary writers, he is the author of six volumes of poetry and six novels. He received the Sub-Saharan Africa Literary Prize in 1999 for his first novel, Blue-White-Red, the Prize of the Five Francophone Continents for Broken Glass, and the Prix Renaudot in 2006 for Memoirs of a Porcupine. He was selected by the French publishing trade journal Lire as one of the fifty writers to watch out for in the coming century. His most recent book is African Psycho.
Black Moses
Alain Mabanckou
LONG-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
A rollicking new novel described as "Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa" (Les Inrockuptibles) from "Africa's Samuel Beckett . . . one of the continent's greatest living writers" (The Guardian).
It's not easy being Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. There's that long name of his for a start, which means, "Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors." Most people just call him Moses. Then there's the orphanage where he lives, run by a malicious political stooge, Dieudonne Ngoulmoumako, and where he's terrorized by two fellow orphans--the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala.
But after Moses exacts revenge on the twins by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft. What follows is a funny, moving, larger-than-life tale that chronicles Moses's ultimately tragic journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld and the politically repressive world of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s and 80s.
Mabanckou's vivid portrayal of Moses's mental collapse echoes the work of Hugo, Dickens, and Brian DePalma's Scarface, confirming Mabanckou's status as one of our great storytellers. Black Moses is a vital new extension of his cycle of Pointe-Noire novels that stand out as one of the grandest, funniest, fictional projects of our time.
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