Harare Review of Books

192 pages.

First published in 1998.

Genre: Fiction.

I’ve always wanted to read Condé; Segu has beeeeen on my list. In the last few months, my concentration span hasn’t been great, and I’ve been looking for really short books to read, so I thought I’d try this. What a pleasant surprise.

This is set in a fictitious country somewhere in Africa, somewhere very like West Africa. Zek, the son of an important man, has brought his Guadelopean (I guessed, and fortunately that was right) wife and children back to a small town in his home country. It’s a difficult marriage with some history, and Zek’s estranged brother, Madou, is an additional complication. Madou is much younger, and an ambitious government minister. Things get fairly tense when Zek comes to the area on government business.

I very much enjoyed Condé’s style, which, in this book, was reminiscent of those wonderful African novels from the 1960s. This was also just a great story, with unexpected twists, and much high drama. Writing about it here, I wish I could read it again for the first time.

I look forward to reading much more from Condé, but this is a high rec.