The hotly anticipated 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 womana's name: Maram.
The key to this mysterious womana's identity is Adansona's unpublished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 GorA©e - 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 unrivaled narrative flair, David Diopa's The Door of
No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism
of Senegala's oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the
highest order.
David Diop was born in Paris and was raised in Senegal. He is the head of
the Arts, Languages, and Literature Department at the University of Pau,
where his research includes such topics as eighteenth-century French
literature and European representations of Africa in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. His second novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, was
awarded the International Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize for fiction. Sam Taylorhas written forThe Guardian, Financial Times,
Vogue and Esquire, and has translated such works as the award-winning
HHhH by Laurent Binet, and the internationally-bestselling The Truth about
the Harry Quebert Affair by JoA«l Dicker.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Sep 19/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 256 pages
9780374606770 • $36.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Fiction / Literary