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Start giftingOur Lady of the Nile
Narrator
Inger Tudor
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Translator
Melanie Mauthner
Length
6 hours 35 minutes
Language
English
Scholastique Mukasonga drops us into an elite Catholic boarding school for young women perched on the edge of the Nile.
Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded into respectable citizens and to escape the dangers of the outside world. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we watch as these girls try on their parents’ preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycée into a microcosm of the country’s mounting racial tensions and violence.
In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, prejudice, and persecution.
With masterful prose that is at once subtle and penetrating, Mukasonga captures a society hurtling towards horror.
Scholastique Mukasonga is an award-winning French Rwandan author of novels, memoirs, and short stories. Born in Rwanda in 1956, she experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and underdeveloped Bugesera district of Rwanda. She was later forced to flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, she learned that thirty-seven of her family members had been massacred.
Reviews
“In skillfully distilling an atrocity…Mukasonga has written a coming-of-age story like no other.”
“Eerily laconic, both comedy and tragedy hauntingly understated…A book about our inability or refusal to protect children from history.”
“Mukasonga’s masterpiece…The novel’s electricity comes from its deceptive lightness, the danse macabre of dorm intrigue on the cusp of Armageddon.”
“Mukasonga has wrought pain, grief, and anger into art. Our Lady of the Nile demands that we ask ourselves how and where violence begins and offers a clear-eyed view of a world falling apart. It is an important contribution to the literature of witness to Rwanda’s agony.”
“Mukasonga’s formidable talent turns this novel about Rwandan girls in a Catholic high school into a masterful story about genocide, colonialism, and all the ways that the world can manipulate and destroy the aspirations of girls.”
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