A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche

WINNER OF THE PRIX DES LIBRAIRES DU QUEBEC

FINALIST FOR THE THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

An extraordinary and devastating love story set amidst the 1994 genocide in Rwanda—now as a Penguin Modern Classic.

The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel is a magnet for a discrete group of Kigali residents: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates and prostitutes. Among these patrons is the hotel waitress Gentille, a beautiful Hutu often mistaken for a Tutsi, who has long been admired by Bernard Valcourt, a foreign journalist. As the two slide into a love affair and prepare for their wedding, we see the world around them coming apart.

This landmark novel confronts the nightmare that ravaged Rwanda in April 1994, when the Hutu-led government orchestrated genocide against the Tutsi people. A denunciation of poverty, ignorance, global apathy and media blindness, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali has at its heart a shattering love story, told with profound compassion and consummate control.

Story Locale: Kigali, Rwanda

GIL COURTEMANCHE was a journalist specializing in international politics, and the author of several non-fiction works and novels. He travelled to Rwanda four times and produced an award-winning TV documentary, The Gospel of AIDS. It was ten years after his first trip to Rwanda that he wrote Un dimanche à la piscine a Kigali, which spent more than a year on Quebec bestseller lists and won the French version of Canada Reads. In 2006, Un dimanche à la piscine a Kigali was released as a feature film. He died in 2011. 

PATRICIA CLAXTON is one of Canada’s foremost translators. Two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for Translation, she has worked with Gabrielle Roy, Nicole Brossard and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, among others.

Author Hometown: Montreal, Quebec