Prix Renaudot (Prix Théophraste-Renaudot)
Jacaranda
A novel that follows the memory of Rwanda and a family's silences across four generations. With restrained prose, it quietly explores the wounds of historical violence and the burden of passing language and memory on.
Work Information
The family's history hidden inside silence slowly comes into view.
Milan, raised in Versailles, turns toward his mother's homeland of Rwanda and traces the memories his family has kept sealed away, along with the time after genocide. Spanning four generations, the novel offers a weighty portrait of loss, reconciliation, testimony, and inheritance.
Review Summaries
-
Readers overwhelmingly praise the breadth of the family story and its focus on memory. A few feel it can be a little explanatory, but the overall response is strongly admiring and emotionally affected.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Chatto & Windus
- Published
- 2026-08-06
- Pages
- 304 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.8 x 4 x 22.2 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781784746063
- ISBN-10
- 1784746061
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Historical
A young man journeys from Paris to Rwanda to discover the truth about his mother’s past and the country of her birth, from bestselling and prize-winning Rwandan-French novelist and hip-hop artist Gaël Faye ‘A writer of great promise and grace’ Chigozie Obioma Milan – the twelve-year-old son of a French father and a Rwandan mother – blames flunking his exams on the emotional trauma of the genocide in his mother’s homeland. It’s a convenient excuse: growing up outside Paris in the 1990s, the violence is an abstraction that only reaches him through distant television broadcasts. That is, until Milan’s mother introduces him to Claude, a young cousin with a bandaged head who has come to France seeking medical treatment. Thrilled to have a new playmate, Milan treats Claude as a brother until one day, he is sent back to Rwanda as quickly as he came. Four years later, Milan travels for the first time to Rwanda, encountering a beguiling country and family members he never knew existed, and reuniting with Claude. But the trip raises more questions for Milan than it answers – about his family’s history, the war and its aftershocks. Over the course of many years, Milan will return to Rwanda again and again, compelled to confront the past and imagine a new kind of future. Jacaranda is a rich and deeply felt portrait of a man seeking to understand his family and his nation as it heals from the unthinkable. ‘Gaël Faye’s talent is breathtaking’ Imbolo Mbue
Gaël Faye was born in 1982 in Burundi to a French father and Rwandan mother. In 1995, after the outbreak of the civil war and the Rwandan genocide, the family moved to France. An author, songwriter and hip-hop artist, he released his first solo album, Pili Pili sur un croissant au beurre, in 2013. His first novel, Small Country, was a bestseller in France, and has been awarded numerous literary prizes, among them the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, and is being published in thirty countries worldwide. His second novel, Jacaranda, won the Prix Renaudot and Choix Goncourt in France. Sarah Ardizzone is an award-winning translator of French-speaking voices. Her collaborations with Gaël Faye include Small Country ( Petit Pays) , producing a bilingual musical performance version for the Edinburgh International Book Festival and translating lyrics for Gaël's platinum album Lundi Méchant . To research Jacaranda , she travelled across Rwanda with Gaël and the creators of the bande dessinée adaptations of his novels, Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia. She was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2022, and made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.