Description
Book Title: At Night All Blood Is Black
ISBN: 9781250800206
By Author(s):DIOP DAVID
By Publisher:HOLTZBRINCK US
Format:PB
*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE*
*ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021*
Winner of theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize for fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award
“Astonishingly good.”Lily Meyer, NPR
“So incantatory and visceral I dont think Ill ever forget it.”Ali Smith,The Guardian| Best Books of 2020
One ofTheWall Street Journal‘s 11 best books of the fall | One ofThe A.V. Club‘s fifteen best books of 2020 |ASunday Timesbest book of the year
Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycens, David Diops English-language, historical fiction debutAt Night All Blood is Blackis a powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-calledChocolatsoldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Mans Land.
Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfas mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the Germans severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfas deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isnt a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?
Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop’sAt Night All Blood is Blackis a dazzling tale of a mans descent into madness.
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