At Night All Blood Is Black

At Night All Blood Is Black - Paperback

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At Night All Blood Is Black
  • At Night All Blood Is Black
At Night All Blood Is Black - Paperback

At Night All Blood Is Black - Paperback

by David Diop
$16.00
$16.00

Book Overview

*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE*
*ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021*

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award

"Astonishingly good." --Lily Meyer, NPR
"So incantatory and visceral I don't think I'll ever forget it." --Ali Smith, The Guardian Best Books of 2020

One of The Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 A Sunday Times best book of the year

Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop's English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a "powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel" (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.

Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called "Chocolat" soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man's Land.

Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa's mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German's severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa's deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn't a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?

Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man's descent into madness.
ISBN9781250800206
Author David Diop
PublisherPicador USA
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedAugust 2021
LanguageENG- English
Pages160
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Fiction Historical Fiction Literary War & Military

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More by David Diop

At Night All Blood Is Black

At Night All Blood Is Black - Paperback

At Night All Blood Is Black - Paperback

By David Diop

About David Diop

David Diop is the author of At Night All Blood Is Black, which was awarded the International Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Born in Paris and raised in Senegal, he is a professor of literature at the University of Pau, where his research encompasses topics including eighteenth-century French literature and European representations of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. He has translated more than sixty books from the French, including Laurent Binet's HHhH and Leïla Slimani's The Perfect Nanny.

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