num_pages: 256
description: Winner of the 2015 French Voices Grand Prize this poignant and riotous tale starts as a tender wry portrait of an ordinary Congolese family but quickly expands into a powerful examination of colonialism decolonization and dead ends in the African continent.Pointe-Noire a bustling port town on Congos southwestern coast is host to Alain Mabanckous astonishing cycle of novels that are already being hailed as one of the grandest funniest fictional projects of our time. His novels have been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and have been described as beautiful (Salman Rushdie) brutally satiric (Uzodinma Iweala) containing fireworks on every page (Los Angeles Review of Books) and vividly colloquial mischievous and outrageous (Marina Warner).Mabanckous riotous new novel The Death of Comrade President returns to the 1970s milieu of his awarding-winning novel Black Moses telling the story of Michel a daydreamer whose life is completely overthrown when in March 1977 just before the arrival of the rainy season Congos Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered. Thanks to his mothers kinship with the president not even naive Michel can remain untouched. And if he is to protect his family Michel must learn to lie.Moving seamlessly between the small-scale worries of everyday life and the grand tragedy of postcolonial politics Mabanckou explores the nuances of the human soul through the naive perspective of a boy who learns the realities of lifeand how much must change for everything to stay the same.
language: English
title: The Death of Comrade President
publisher: The New Press