About the Book
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED FICTION
'Stunningly realized... A spellbinding novel' MAAZA MENGISTE, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Shadow King
'Diop has opened a new way of thinking about the eighteenth century and its hideous cruelties' ABDULRAZAK GURNAH, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
'A compelling romantic adventure... Through an act of remembrance, Diop seeks to build a repository of lives and histories lost to the slave trade' FINANCIAL TIMES
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The captivating new novel from David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize
Paris, 1806. Michel Adanson is dying. The last word to escape his lips is a woman's name: Maram. Who was she? Why, in the course of his long life, has he never spoken of her before?
As Adanson's daughter sorts through his things, she discovers a notebook. It reveals a secret history both fantastical and terrible, of his time as a young botanist travelling in Senegal.
How Adanson first heard of the 'revenant': a young woman of noble birth, abducted and sold into slavery across the seas, who then did the impossible-she came back, to live in hiding.
How he became obsessed with finding her, embarking on an odyssey that would lead to danger and destruction.
How a man who longed to solve the mysteries of nature instead found himself faced with the uncontrollable impulses of the human heart.
Tragic and tender, alive with feeling, this is a story of adventure, revenge and impossible desires, one which subverts our every expectation about who we are and who we love.
About the Author :
DAVID DIOP was born in Paris in 1966 and grew up in Senegal. He now lives in France, where he is a professor of Eighteenth Century Literature at the University of Pau. David's second novel, At Night All Blood is Black, has been translated into more than 30 languages, winning the International Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Prize, as well as major prizes in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and was chosen by Barack Obama as one of his summer reads. Beyond the Door of No Return was longlisted for the Goncourt Prize, has sold over 120,000 copies in France, and was shortlisted for the National Book Award in the US.
SAM TAYLOR is a translator, novelist and journalist. He is the author of four novels and the award-winning translator of more than 60 books from French, including Laurent Binet's HHhH, Leïla Slimani's Lullaby, and Hubert Mingarelli's A Meal in Winter.
Review :
Diop explores the cruelties of colonialism in a powerful story of love destroyed
A compelling romantic adventure... Intricately layered, enfolding stories within stories, Beyond the Door of No Return is many things at once: mystery, autobiography, epistolary, romance, adventure, confession. Through an act of remembrance, Diop seeks to build a repository of lives and histories lost to the slave trade
Stunningly realized and written in exquisite prose, Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story, an adventure tale, and an unflinching examination of the unexpected ways that colonialism and greed ravaged everyone it touched, European and African. It is above all else, a spellbinding novel about the high price of betrayal-of others, and oneself
A hypnotic, powerful historical novel in which stories nest within one another like dolls... In less skilled hands, the novel's structure would not work... But the opposite happens here. In a few vivid brush strokes, Diop brings to life not only Adanson, but also the ways in which his dreams, loves and losses shaped the lives of those around him. It all coheres mesmerizingly
Does a masterful job of showing up the racist brutalities of the slave trade and its associated cruelties and hypocrisies... and wraps it all up in a gripping, galloping narrative that challenges perceptions to the very last page
I read Beyond the Door of No Return with pleasure and admiration. David Diop has opened up a new way of thinking about the eighteenth century and its hideous cruelties
With Beyond The Door of No Return, David Diop once again makes us re-examine and reimagine West African history and the wrongdoing that has been done there by Europeans. This book illustrates and raises questions about guilt, language, othering, treachery, adventure and love. It is a beautifully written, yet easy to read, novel, that will leave you thinking long after you finish it
A formerly enslaved woman gets her revenge... Diop has turned fascinating historical records into fiction... Maram's touching story offers crucial lessons about unconscionable acts of slavery, perpetrated on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean
Less brutal than Diop's International Booker Prize-winning At Night All Blood is Black but no less powerful... With its sumptuous physical descriptions, shades of language, and smooth overlap of truth and invention, this is masterful storytelling. The ease with which the narratives unfold belies the emotional force they gather... A mesmerizing tale
A captivating intergenerational epic influenced by Senegalese oral tradition... A novel to devour quickly, but which will leave readers contemplating its story long after
Further endorsement of fiction's ability for revelation... There is suspense, adversity and tension
At once melancholy and luminous
Diop's poetic sensibility marks every sentence of this resonant story
Reading about another country, another culture, another age has the brain-opening effect that Adanson experienced almost 300 years ago... There's nothing quite like this book out there
[A] thrilling novel, full of escapade and adventure, but also an elegant meditation on the relationships between fathers and daughters, and on the challenges of reckoning with the legacy of personal and political histories
Offers a portrait of a world in which beauty and brutality co-exist
A sublime odyssey confronting the universal values of the Enlightenment with the Atlantic slave trade
Definitively confirms David Diop as a major author on the modern literary landscape
Gripping... A twisty novel
A humanist meditation anchored in African tradition... A historical epic with a bewitching style... A superb adventure story
David Diop masterfully blends genres... Weaving together Western myths and African beliefs, the rationality of the dawning age of science and timeless magic
Bewitching at first, the story takes a cruel, overwhelming turn as the time for decisions comes
A magnificent novel about romantic passion, and how it destroys as much as it saves
A compelling critique of colonial violence and the dehumanisation of Black people, this book illustrates how inhabiting another language promotes compassion
It's hard to imagine a more gripping or fertile subject for Diop's fictional exploration... Romantically and dramatically is how he tells it here, with a delight in narrative that honours Senegalese oral culture
A complex tale rooted in historical research and filled with curiosities
A stunning and adventurous novel [that] invites the reader to wrestle with belief as a concept, whether with regard to religion, methods of storytelling, or even personal belief in oneself to write and rewrite your own narratives
A tragic adventure novel related in crisp epistolary form
