Igifu

The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, "rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide." Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgotten. The story of the author's mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother's voice in a haunting work of art.

Mukasonga unsparingly resurrects the horrors of the Rwandan geocide while lyrically recording the quieter moments of daily life with her family—a moving tribute to all those who are displaced, who suffer. Mukasonga’s extraordinary, lyrical, and heartbreaking book … is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about the endurance of the human spirit and who hopes for a better world. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Los Angeles Review of Books Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches is a compelling chronicle of the author’s childhood in the years leading up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In a spare and penetrating tone, Mukasonga brings to life the scenes of her family’s forced displacement from Rwanda to neighboring Burundi. With a view made lucid through time and pain, Mukasonga erodes the distance between her present and her past, resurrecting and paying homage to her family members who were massacred in the genocide, but also, in movingly simple language, the beauty present in quiet, daily moments with her loved ones. As lyrical as it is tragic, Cockroaches is Mukasonga’s tribute to her family’s suffering and to the lingering grip of the dead on the living.

Friendship, deceit, fear, and persecution at an elite boarding school for young women in Rwanda, fifteen years before the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi . . . “Mukasonga’s masterpiece” (Julian Lucas, NYRB) Scholastique Mukasonga drops us into an elite Catholic boarding school for young women perched on the edge of the Nile. Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded into respectable citizens and to escape the dangers of the outside world. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we watch as these girls try on their parents’ preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycée into a microcosm of the country’s mounting racial tensions and violence. In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, prejudice, and persecution. With masterful prose that is at once subtle and penetrating, Mukasonga captures a society hurtling towards horror.

A powerful, moving, and revelatory novel set in nineteenth-century Africa--the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried the body of explorer and missionary David Livingstone from Zambia to Zanzibar so that his remains could be returned home to England. Dawn, 1 May 1873, on the outskirts of Chitambo's village, near Lake Bangweulu in modern-day Zambia. The Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone has died. He had been heading south in the African interior on an increasingly maniacal mission to penetrate the greatest secret of Victorian exploration. He wanted to find the source of the world's longest river, the Nile. Instead, on an isolated and swampy floodplain, Dr. Livingstone found his death. How Livingstone is to be buried will be decided by his African companions, a group of sixty-nine men, women, and children. They decide that come what may, Livingstone, his papers and maps, must all be carried to England. They bury his heart and other organs under a tree and dry his flesh like jerky in the sun. Over nine months, battling severe illness and hunger, hostile chiefs and unknown terrain, all while taking a tortuous route of more than 1,000 miles to the coast to avoid marauding slave traders, they march with Livingstone's body and the evidence of his explorations. Their journey has been called "the most extraordinary story in African exploration." In this novel, their story is retold anew in the distinct, indelible voices of Livingstone's sharp-tongued female cook, Halima; a repressed, formerly enslaved African missionary named Jacob Wainwright; and the collective voice of the retainers. The result is a profound and tragic journey--an epic like no other--that encompasses all of the hypocrisy of slavery and colonization while celebrating resilience, loyalty, and love. In Out of Darkness, Shining Light, Petina Gappah has created an ambitious and artful masterpiece.

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A new masterwork of satire, lore, and living memory from the leading voice of French-Rwandan literature “Mukasonga breathes upon a vanished world and brings it to life in all its sparkling multifariousness” --J.M. Coetzee In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity. When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth. Kibogo’s story is reserved for the evening’s end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge. To some, Kibogo’s tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor’s hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder – can Kibogo really summon the rain?

The heroine falls in love with mysterious Bolobolo and attempts to win his love by preparing a variety of wonderful dishes for him. The novel is peppered throughout with recipes.

SHORTLISTED for the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2021 • WINNER of the Nigeria Prize for Literature 2021 • SHORTLISTED for the Chinua Achebe Prize for Nigerian Writing 2021 • WINNER of the SprinNG Women Authors Prize 2020 • WINNER of the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair 2019 “The Son of the House is a compelling novel about two women caught in a constricting web of tradition, class, gender, and motherhood.” — FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review The lives of two Nigerian women divided by class and social inequality intersect when they're kidnapped, held captive, and forced to await their fate together. In the Nigerian city of Enugu, young Nwabulu, a housemaid since the age of ten, dreams of becoming a typist as she endures her employers’ endless chores. She is tall and beautiful and in love with a rich man’s son. Educated and privileged, Julie is a modern woman. Living on her own, she is happy to collect the gold jewellery lovestruck Eugene brings her, but has no intention of becoming his second wife. When a kidnapping forces Nwabulu and Julie into a dank room years later, the two women relate the stories of their lives as they await their fate. Pulsing with vitality and intense human drama, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s debut is set against four decades of vibrant Nigeria, celebrating the resilience of women as they navigate and transform what remains a man’s world.