The author has cited some letters as inspiration behind the book and its emotional intensity. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack Frances. Upon its US release late last year, the novel was hailed as “astonishingly good” by NPR, “a searing, eye-opening tale of innocence destroyed” by Kirkus, and “a spare yet extraordinary novel about this bloody stain on human history” by the New York Times. His first novel, a work of historical fiction 1889, L’Attraction universelle was published in 2012 but it is his second novel, Frère d’âme or At Night All Blood Is Black, which has garnered international attention. Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Inspired by the silence surrounding his great-grandfather’s wartime experiences, Diop’s second novel (his first to be translated into English) interweaves the history of World War I with the history of colonialism, charting the decent into madness and brutality of a young soldier who witnesses his childhood friend die on the frontline.įirst published in France in 2018, At Night All Blood Is Black has already won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and the Los Angeles Times Fiction Book Prize. David Diop today became the first French writer, and the first writer of African heritage, to win the prestigious International Booker Prize for translated fiction for his harrowing novel about a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the first world war, At Night All Blood Is Black. Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.
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