Beyond the Door of No Return
Description
"Stunningly realized . . . Exquisite . . . A spellbinding novel about the high price of betrayal--of others, and oneself." --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize
One of the Los Angeles Times's most anticipated books of the fall The thrilling and deeply moving new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize.Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman's name: Maram. The key to this mysterious woman's identity is Adanson's unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée--a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade--to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart. Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop's Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal's oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.
Product Details
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
About the Author
David Diop was born in Paris and raised in Senegal. He is a professor of literature at the University of Pau, where his research encompasses such topics as eighteenth-century French literature and European representations of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His first novel to be published in English, At Night All Blood Is Black, was awarded the International Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction.
Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. He has translated more than sixty books from the French, including Laurent Binet's HHhH and Leïla Slimani's The Perfect Nanny.Reviews
"I read Beyond the Door of No Return with pleasure and admiration. David Diop has opened up a new way of thinking about the eighteenth century and its hideous cruelties." --Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Afterlives
"Stunningly realized and written in exquisite prose, Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story, an adventure tale, and an unflinching examination of the unexpected ways that colonialism and greed ravaged everyone it touched, European and African. It is above all else, a spellbinding novel about the high price of betrayal--of others, and oneself." --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize "A mesmerizing tale . . . Less brutal than Diop's International Booker Prize-winning At Night All Blood is Black (2020) but no less powerful . . . With its sumptuous physical descriptions, shades of language, and smooth overlap of truth and invention, this is masterful storytelling. The ease with which the narratives (including Aglaé's) unfold belies the emotional force they gather." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "A captivating intergenerational epic influenced by Senegalese oral tradition . . . Told as a series of fast-paced stories within stories, the novel contemplates race, hierarchy, religion, legends . . . Diop writes excellently of historical and regional minutiae, as in his descriptions of the sheer heat and exhaustion his characters face on their travels. This is a novel to devour quickly, but which will leave readers contemplating its story long after." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
