Gila Walker

Best Books of 2018 (The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker & Washington Post list)
 
“Extraordinary novel . . . Miano’s feat is to restrict her perspective to the points of view of the Mulongo, conjuring afresh the horror and immediacy of an event that time has rendered matter-of-fact. . . . The writing, benefiting from Gila Walker’s excellent translation from the French, is restrained and dispassionate, so that its fierce emotional energy seems to well up naturally from the characters rather than being imposed by the author from without.”
(Wall Street Journal)
 
“Reading Miano’s brilliant, pitiless novel is like treading water in an undertow. The approaching wave — more than four centuries high and tens of millions of victims long – is invisible from within the story’s deliberately confined perspective. But the omission only enhances its force. . . . The elimination of hindsight is narratively thrilling and Miano’s decision to adopt a Douala perspective and chronology – rather than the diaspora’s elegiac retrospect – profoundly original.”
(New York Times)