book cover of Descent into Night
 

Descent into Night

(2017)
A novel by

 
 
Translated from French by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott.

From Goncourt Prize finalist a beautiful and brilliant new novel.

With a nod to Samuel Beckett and Bohumil Hrabal, a young dramatist from a West African nation describes a student protest against a brutal oligarchy and its crushing aftermath. While distributing leaflets with provocative quotations from Beckett, Ito Baraka is taken to a camp where torture, starvation, beatings, and rape are normal. Forced to inform on his friends, whose fates he now fears, and released a broken man, he is enabled to escape to Quebec. His one goal is to tell the story of the protest and pay homage to Koli Lem, a teacher, cellmate, and lover of books, who was blinded by being forced to look at the sun--and is surely a symbol of the nation.

Edem Awumey gives us a darkly moving and terrifying novel about fear and play, repression and protest, and the indomitable nature of creativity.

"Un recit poignant et magnifiquement ecrit."
- La Presse

"Grave, tragique, dur, violent, mais porte par une ecriture fievreuse,
embrasee. La surenchere poetique n'est pas loin ... "
- Le Devoir


Genre: Literary Fiction

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