Scholastique Mukasonga

From the author of the critically acclaimed novel Our Lady of the Nile, comes a haunting, delicately wrought work of non-fiction, memorialising a lost childhood, community and way of life. When Scholastique Mukasonga's family are killed in the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda, she is unable to fulfil her mother Stefania's wish to shroud her body...

Longlisted for The National Book Critics Circle Awards for Barrios Books in Translation Prize. In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvellous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity. When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of...

Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens, and to escape the dangers of the outside world. In the elite school run by white nuns, the young ladies learn, eat, sleep and gossip together. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the girls try on their parents' preconceptions and attitudes, transforming...