Senegalese Author David Diop’s First Book Since Winning the International Booker Prize
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Loading... - Ousseynou Dieng
- 24 Apr 2023
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French-Senegalese author and Booker prize winner David Diop has a new novel coming out on September 19.
Titled Beyond the Door of No Return, the book chronicles a love story between a botanist and a female slave, and is set in 19th century Senegal during the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Translated by Sam Taylor, the novel will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.
After Diop won the International Booker Prize in 2021 for his novel At Night All Blood is Black, readers have been impatient to see what Diop writes next. His new novel promises to be equally exciting and full of narrative possibility as his previous one. Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return draws on the lyricism of Senegal’s rich oral traditions and stays close to the realities of history while still maintaining sensitivity.
This historical epic will transport you to the early nineteenth century immediately. The novel starts off with the main character, botanist Michel Adanson, lying on his deathbed and uttering his last word – Maram, his secret lover’s name. What follows is a whirlwind of a story involving Adanson’s hidden memoir, Maram’s escape from slavery, and a love story that resists the violence of French colonial occupation and the isolation of the Senegalese bush. Read More…
