Eve Guerra and Gaël Faye on Loss and Homecoming

As part of its Black History Month, the French Institute is delighted to welcome Eve Guerra, for the English-language launch of her debut novel, Repatriation, and Gaël Faye, who will discuss his second novel, Jacaranda. The two authors will be in conversation with writer and critic Oonagh Devitt Tremblay. The evening turns on heritage and belonging.

In Repatriation, a young French-Congolese woman learns of her father’s death in Cameroon and sets out to bring his body back to France, uncovering the colonial history and family silences behind her own life.

Annabella Morelli is twenty-three, lives in the old town of Lyon and dreams of becoming a poet, far from Congo-Brazzaville where she was born. She is the daughter of a Franco-Italian worker who went into exile in Africa and a Congolese woman who became a mother too young. She remembers a happy childhood, the scent of shea and the dancing, until the Christmas of her seventh year, when her father’s anger erupts and her mother leaves the family home.

When she learns of her father’s death, Annabella’s world collapses for a second time. As she tries to repatriate his body, she is forced to confront the secrets and lies at the heart of her own existence. Repatriation is a novel about grief and family, and about what colonial history leaves unspoken between the generations.

Rapatriement (Grasset, 2024) won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and the Prix Transfuge du Meilleur Premier Roman. Clodagh Kinsella’s translation, Repatriation, was published this year by Foundry Editions. 

In Jacaranda, a young man raised in France goes in search of the family history his Rwandan mother has kept from him, and of the country she left behind.

Milan is twelve in 1994, growing up outside Paris, and the genocide against the Tutsi in his mother’s homeland reaches him only through the television news. Then Claude, a young cousin who has come to France for medical treatment, enters his life, only to be sent back to Rwanda without warning. At sixteen, Milan visits Rwanda for the first time, and he keeps returning over the decades that follow. Spanning four generations, Jacaranda traces his long effort to break his mother’s silence and to understand a country rebuilding itself after the genocide.

Jacaranda (Grasset, 2024) won the Prix Renaudot. Sarah Ardizzone’s English translation was published this year by Chatto & Windus.

Copies of the book will be available to buy on the night in both French and English, courtesy of our partner bookshop Librairie La Page.