The Barefoot Woman

It was while we were weeding the sorghum field that Mama taught me most of her memories of the Rwanda that used to be. Alas! I've forgotten so many of the secrets Stefania told me, the secrets a mother tells only her daughter.' From the author of the critically acclaimed novel Our Lady of the Nile, 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 with pagne. So instead, she now weaves her mother's shroud with words, drawing on inherited traditions of storytelling to offer a devastating, unforgettable tribute. In beautiful, lucid prose, Mukasonga lays before us the fierce courage and strength of her mother as she fought for her children's safety, her family's exile to the Burundi border and her community's efforts to maintain ritual and tradition. Vivid, evocative and deeply moving, this is a remarkable work of art and act of love.

Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsis swept through Rwanda. Thirty-seven of Mukasonga's family members were among the massacred. Mukasonga has won many prizes, among them the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom. Her other books include the novel Our Lady of the Nile, which was a Dublin Literary Award finalist and won, among other prizes, the Ahmadou Kourouma and the Renaudot; Cockroaches (chosen by the New York Times as one of the fifty best autobiographical stories of the last fifty years) and Igifu. Her stories are regularly published in the New Yorker.