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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS of 2021

By the winner of the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize in Literature

“At once touching and devastating, the book explores the effects of loss and grief on a personal, communal, and national level, but does so with a personal voice that feels more like a having a conversation than reading a book…it is a novel that cements Condé as a literary giant who beautifully chronicles the humanity found in some of the most violent places in the world.” —GABINO IGLESIAS, NPR

Babakar is a doctor living alone, with only the memories of his childhood in Mali. In his dreams, he receives visits from his blue-eyed mother and his ex-lover Azelia, both now gone, as are the hopes and aspirations he’s carried with him since his arrival in Guadeloupe. Until, one day, the child Anaïs comes into his life, forcing him to abandon his solitude. Anaïs’s Haitian mother died in childbirth, leaving her daughter destitute—now Babakar is all she has, and he wants to offer this little girl a future. Together they fly to Haiti, a beautiful, mysterious island plagued by violence, government corruption, and rebellion. Once there, Babakar and his two friends, the Haitian Movar and the Palestinian Fouad, three different identities looking for a more compassionate world, begin a desperate search for Anaïs’s family.

Maryse Condé was born in Guadeloupe in 1937 as the youngest of eight siblings. She earned her MA and PhD in Comparative Literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and went on to have a distinguished academic career, receiving the title of Professor Emerita of French at Columbia University in New York, where she taught and lived for many years. She has also lived in various West African countries, most notably in Mali, where she gained inspiration for her worldwide bestseller Segu, for which she was awarded the African Literature Prize and several other respected French awards. Condé was awarded the 2018 New Academy Prize (or “Alternative Nobel”) in Literature as well as the 2021 Prix Mondial Cino del Duca for her oeuvre. She also received the Grand-Croix de l’Ordre national du Mérite from President Emmanuel Macron in 2020.

Richard Philcox, based in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region in France, is Maryse Condé’s husband and translator. He has also published new translations of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. He has taught translation on various American campuses and won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts for the translation of Condé’s works.