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Comrade Papa
On sale
4th July 2024
Price: £12
BY THE AUTHOR OF STANDING HEAVY – SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023
Following the death of his parents, Dabilly, a young white man, seeks a life of colonial adventure in Cote d’Ivoire. It is 1880 and Dabilly joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes into a coast as yet untouched by colonisation.
A century later, a Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam begins to research his family history. When he is sent to Cote d’Ivoire to visit his grandmother, he will discover traces of an ancestor he never knew existed.
GauZ’ looks across continents and centuries to create a portrait of two very different men, tracing the paths and histories that connect them and plunging us deep into the history of colonisation in the Cote d’Ivoire.
Translated from the French by Frank Wynne
Following the death of his parents, Dabilly, a young white man, seeks a life of colonial adventure in Cote d’Ivoire. It is 1880 and Dabilly joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes into a coast as yet untouched by colonisation.
A century later, a Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam begins to research his family history. When he is sent to Cote d’Ivoire to visit his grandmother, he will discover traces of an ancestor he never knew existed.
GauZ’ looks across continents and centuries to create a portrait of two very different men, tracing the paths and histories that connect them and plunging us deep into the history of colonisation in the Cote d’Ivoire.
Translated from the French by Frank Wynne
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Reviews
GauZ' breaks down the language of colonisation ... with marvellous linguistic invention. This book that made me laugh and smile is a post-colonial homage to Romain Gary's bestselling The Life Before Us
History writ large is interwoven with family history voiced by a child narrator. This novel is a deftly built explosive device
The point of view transcends racial essentialisms to instead tell the story of people ... An expansive novel that is political without being self-righteous
A novel about the clash between cultures and languages ... GauZ's prose is intoxicating
Audacious and inventive
Funny, ebullient, often chaotic . . . GauZ' was shortlisted for the International Booker prize for his novel Standing Heavy. Comrade Papa is even better