The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Conde

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023

“The great voice of the Caribbean.” —Jury, International Booker 2023

“French novelist Condé (Waiting for the Waters to Rise) delivers an ingenious bildungsroman of a messianic figure in contemporary Martinique. Readers will be transfixed.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

A miracle baby is born on Easter Sunday, rumored to be the child of God. Award-winning Caribbean author Maryse Condé follows his journey in search of his origins and mission.

One Easter Sunday, Madame Ballandra puts her hands together and exclaims: “A miracle!” Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with gray-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumor, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground. From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand the meaning of his mission. Will he be able to change the fate of humanity? And what will the New World Gospel reveal? For all its beauty, vivacity, humor, and power, Maryse Condé’s latest novel is above all a work of combat. Lucid and full of conviction, Condé attests that solidarity and love remain our most extraordinary and lifesaving forces.

Maryse Condé is the Grande Dame of Caribbean Literature. She was born in Guadeloupe in 1934 as the youngest of eight siblings. She taught Francophone Literature at Colombia University in New York, and lived there 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. She conquered the hearts of many readers in English-language territories with her novels The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana and Waiting for the Waters to Rise, longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US.

Richard Philcox 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 college 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. Philcox’s translation of Condé’s Waiting for the Waters to Rise, published by World Editions, was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US, and his translation of her Crossing the Mangrove is now a Penguin Classic. Philcox has also translated Condé’s other World Editions title, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana.