Alain Mabanckou

Le héros de Black Bazar est un dandy africain de notre temps, amoureux des cols italiens et des chaussures Weston, qui découvre sa vocation d'écrivain au détour d'un chagrin d'amour. Naviguant entre complainte et dérision, il brosse avec truculence un tableau sans concession de la folie du monde qui l'entoure. Tour à tour burlesque et pathétique, son récit va prêter sa voix à toute une galerie de personnages étonnants, illustrant chacun à leur manière la misère et la grandeur de la condition humaine. Un roman à la verve endiablée, tournant le dos aux convenances et aux idées reçues, par l'une des voix majeures de la littérature francophone actuelle.

Pour tuer ceux qui se dressent sur son chemin, Kibandi fait appel à son double animal : un porc-épic. La petite bête, philosophe, malicieuse, armée de ses redoutables piquants, exécute les souhaits macabres de son maître. Le couple meurtrier sillonne l'Afrique jusqu'au jour où Kibandi rencontre bien plus redoutable que lui. - Editeur.

Les Noirs de France entretiennent avec leurs origines éparses un lien ambigu. Qu'ils viennent d'arriver dans l'Hexagone ou qu'ils y soient nés, ils conservent de la patrie d'origine l'image d'un éventuel refuge au cas où leur situation ne leur conviendrait plus en France. Ils sont français ou aspirent à l'être mais demeurent pourtant franco quelque chose. L'auteur évoque son propre parcours.

In this book, Mabanckou's trademark humour and surrealism combine in an autobiographical novel. Michel is ten years old, living in Pointe Noire, Congo, in the 1970s. His mother sells peanuts at the market, his father works at the Victory Palace Hotel, and brings home books left behind by the white guests. Planes cross the sky overhead, and Michel and his friend Lounes dream about the countries where they'll land. While news comes over the radio of the American hostage crisis in Tehran, the death of the Shah, the scandal of the Boukassa diamonds, Michel struggles with the demands of his twelve year old girlfriend Caroline, who threatens to leave him for a bully in the football team. But most worrying for Michel, the witch doctor has told his mother that he has hidden the key to her womb, and must return it before she can have another child. Somehow he must find it. This is a humurous and poignant account of an African childhood, drawn from Alain Mabanckou's life.

"Pointe-Noire, capitale ̌conomique du Congo, dans les anňes 1970. Le narrateur, Michel, est un gaṙon d'une dizaine d'anňes qui fait l'apprentissage de la vie, de l'amitǐ et de l'amour, tandis que le Congo vit sa premïre ďcennie d'inďpendance sous la houlette de " l'immortel Marien Ngouabi ", chef charismatique marxiste. Les ̌pisodes d'une chronique familiale truculente et joyeuse se succ̈dent, avec ses situations burlesques, ses personnages hauts en couleur : le p̈re adoptif de Michel, řceptionniste ̉l'h̥tel Victory Palace ; maman Pauline, qui a parfois du mal ̉ ̌duquer son turbulent fils unique ; l'oncle Reň, fort en gueule, riche et ňanmoins opportuňment communiste ; l'ami Loun̈s, dont la soeur Caroline provoque chez Michel un furieux remue-m̌nage d'hormones ; bien d'autres encore. Mais voil̉ que Michel est souṗonň, peut-̊tre ̉raison, de ďtenir certains sortil̈ges... Au fil d'un řcit enjoǔ, Alain Mabanckou nous offre une sorte de Vie devant soi ̉l'africaine. Les histoires d'amour y tiennent la plus grande place, avec des personnages attachants de jeunes filles et de femmes. La langue que Mabanckou pr̊te ̉son narrateur est řjouissante, pleine d'images cocasses, et sa fausse na̐veť fait merveille"--Page 4 of cover. Pointe-Noire, the economic capital of Congo, in the 1970s. The narrator, Michel, is a boy of about ten years who learns about life, friendship and love while the Congo experienced its first decade of independence under the leadership of "the immortal Marien Ngouabi", the charismatic Marxist leader. The episodes of a truculent and joyful family chronicle succeed one another, with its burlesque situations, its colorful characters: Michel's adoptive father, receptionist at the Victory Palace Hotel; Mother Pauline, who sometimes has trouble educating her turbulent single son; Uncle Rene, strong in the mouth, rich and nevertheless opportunely communist; his friend, Lounes, whose sister Caroline provoked in Michel a furious stirring of hormones; and many others as well. But Michel is suspected, perhaps rightly, of holding certain spells ... Alain Mabanckou provides us with a kind of African life before oneself. Love stories hold the place of primacy, with endearing characters of girls and women. The language which Mabanckou lends to his narrator is rejoicing, full of comical images, and his false naivety is marvelous.

"A dazzling meditation on home-coming and belonging from one of "Africa's greatest writers."--The Guardian"--

Gregoire Nakobomayo, a petty criminal, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine. He's planned the crime for some time, but still, the act of murder requires a bit of psychological and logistical preparation. Luckily, he has a mentor to call on, the far more accomplished serial killer Angoualima. The fact that Angoualima is dead doesn't prevent Gregoire from holding lengthy conversations with him. Little by little, Gregoire interweaves Angoualima's life and criminal exploits with his own. Continuing with the plan despite a string of botched attempts, Gregoire's final shot at offing Germaine leads to an abrupt unravelling. Lauded in France for its fresh and witty style, "African Psycho's" inventive use of language surprises and relieves the reader by sending up this disturbing subject.

This tale of wild adventure reveals the dashed hopes of Africans living between worlds. When Moki returns to his village from France wearing designer clothes and affecting all the manners of a Frenchman, Massala-Massala, who lives the life of a humble peanut farmer after giving up his studies, begins to dream of following in Moki’s footsteps. Together, the two take wing for Paris, where Massala-Massala finds himself a part of an underworld of out-of-work undocumented immigrants. After a botched attempt to sell metro passes purchased with a stolen checkbook, he winds up in jail and is deported. Blue White Red is a novel of postcolonial Africa where young people born into poverty dream of making it big in the cities of their former colonial masters.

"A rollicking new novel described as "Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa" (Les Inrockuptibles) by the finalist for the Man International Booker Prize It's not easy being Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. There's that long name of his for a start, which means, "Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors." Most people just call him Moses. Then there's the orphanage where he lives, run by a malicious political stooge, Dieudonne Ngoulmoumako, and where he's terrorized by two fellow orphans-the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala. But after Moses exacts revenge on the twins by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft. What follows is a funny, moving, larger-than-life tale that chronicles Moses's ultimately tragic journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld and the politically repressive world of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s and 80s. Mabanckou's vivid portrayal of Moses's mental collapse echoes the work of Hugo, Dickens, and Brian DePalma's Scarface, confirming Mabanckou's status as one of our great storytellers. Black Moses is a vital new extension of his cycle of Pointe-Noire novels that stand out as one of the grandest, funniest, fictional projects of our time"--

L'histoire de Petit Piment, un jeune orphelin effectuant sa scolarité dans une institution d'accueil catholique. Lors de la révolution socialiste, il en profite pour s'évader. Adolescent, il commet toutes sortes de larcins. Il trouve refuge auprès de Maman Fiat 500 et de ses dix filles. Mais de nouvelles épreuves lui feront perdre la tête.

"From the New York Times bestselling author of the Flowers in the Attic and My Sweet Audrina series, now Lifetime movies, comes book two of the haunting saga of identical twin sisters tortured by their perfectionist mother--until one of them snaps. Haylee and Kaylee Fitzgerald are twin sisters who have been forced to be identical in every way by their domineering mother. She insists they wear the same clothes, eat the same food, get the same grades, and have all the same friends. But both are growing weary of her obsession with their similarities, so when they finally attend high school, they find little ways to highlight their independence. The transition isn't as easy as expected, however, and soon both sisters are thrust into a world that their mother never prepared them for--a world with far more dangerous consequences than just upsetting Mother"--