The Lieutenant of Kouta is the first novel in Massa Makan Diabaté’s award-winning trilogy. Featuring an introduction by leading Diabaté scholar Cheick M. Chérif Keïta and Shane Auerbach, it tells the story, part tragicomic and part hagiographic, of an African lieutenant in the French Army who returns as a decorated hero from the battlefields of Europe to Kouta, a fictionalized version of the author’s own birthplace, the Malian town of Kita. Upon his return, Siriman Keita finds it ...

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE The prize-winning story of a Senegalese soldier in the trenches, told in hypnotic, powerful prose Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France's German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open. Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the...

WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY KATIE KITAMURA'A work of visceral urgency and power' AMITAV GHOSH'Totally and shockingly alive from its very first paragraph' ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN'An extraordinary book' SUNDAY TELEGRAPHAgu is just a boy when war arrives at his village. His mother and sister are rescued by the UN, while he and his father remain to fight the rebels. 'Run!' shouts his fa...

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this 'minor detail' of history. A haunting m...

The military cult classic with resonance to the wars in Iraq and Vietnam—now back in printWhen The Centurions was first published in 1960, readers were riveted by the thrilling account of soldiers fighting for survival in hostile environments. They were equally transfixed by the chilling moral question the novel posed: how to fight when the “age of heroics is over.” As relevant today as it was half a century ago, The Centurions is a gripping milit...

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATUREBabakar is an African doctor living alone until the child Anaïs comes into his life. Forced to abandon his solitude, he takes her to Haiti in search of her family.In May 2020, we published The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana by Maryse Conde; one of our most high-profile publications to date. Here’s a selection of the most brilliant reviews:“Condé is at her signature best:...

Last seen in Napoleon's Pyramids, fleeing the forces of evil in a runaway hot-air balloon over Egypt, Ethan Gage undergoes further life-threatening adventures in this rollicking sequel.Nine months before the balloon incident, Gage arrived in the Holy Land with his benefactor, Napoleon Bonaparte. After various misunderstandings involving the secrets of the Great Pyramid, Bonaparte became his implacable enemy. Now, accused of treason by Napoleon's minions, Pierre Najac and Najac's bos...

Between the lines of the official histories of the frontier worlds of the 29th Century lie myriad confidential accounts of the boners, near-catastrophes, and interstellar crises that were bound to occur when human meets non-human. The adventures of CDC (Corps Diplomatique Terra) diplomat Jame Retief loom large in six highly classified missions where brain and brawn save land and lives despite red-tape bound superiors amid conspiracy and conflict across alien planets - guaranteed astounding...

Just after Rimi and Shusei had vowed to cast away their feelings for each other, Emperor Shohi asked Rimi to become his empress. Now, Rimi is spending her days on edge. Suddenly, the Quinary Dragon falls ill, and Rimi travels to the old capital of Hanin to find a cure. There she discovers a mirror, and strange things start to happen around her, including a bedridden Shohi whom Rimi needs to make food for. While she searches for the cause behind what is happening, she discovers a shocking s...

A lost classic lays bare the darkest moment of France's post-war historyFirst published in Paris in 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, On Leave received a handful of reviews and soon disappeared from view. Through David Bellos's translation, this lost classic has been rediscovered. Spare, forceful and moving, the novel describes a week in the lives of a sergeant, a corporal and a private, home on leave in Paris. Full of sympathy and feeling, i...

The Yillian Way by Keith Laumer.

The Black Terrorist is a fictional account built around the true, extraordinary, but little-known story of Addi Bâ. Addi Bâ was born in Guinea about 1916, brought to France in the late 1930s, and became a riflemen in the Twelfth Regiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais (African soldiers from French colonies) fighting for France during World War II. Captured after the Battle of the Meuse, Addi escapes from German forces, wanders in the forests, before finding refuge in a village in the V...