A Sunday At The Pool In Kigali

Editeur : Canongate Canons

Langue : Anglais

The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel is a magnet for a discrete group of Kigali residents: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates and prostitutes. Among these patrons is the hotel waitress Gentille, a beautiful Hutu often mistaken for a Tutsi, who has long been admired by Bernard Valcourt, a foreign journalist. As the two slide into a love affair, civil unrest in Rwanda makes insidious progress, while the people around the pool take on the menacing guises of war.
This landmark novel -- penned by a journalist who spent several years in Africa -- confronts the nightmare that ravaged Rwanda in April 1994, when the Hutu-led government orchestrated genocide against the Tutsi people. With profound compassion and consummate control, Courtemanche navigates a world about to be wrested apart, where the faces of the aggressors could easily be those of our neighbours, our friends, our families. A solemn denunciation of poverty, ignorance, global apathy and media blindness, this stirring hymn to humanity asks at its heart, like all great literature, the only question that matters: How are we to live our lives, and how to die?