RaveThe New StatesmanMendez distinguishes his own work through his careful attention to the line between self-acceptance and self-abandon ... the first novel I’ve read where the white, male, middle-aged body is eroticised and fetishised to this degree; its strength, its smells, its symbolism and its possession are written about in a way that maps power relationships going back centuries, and undercuts the more typical focus on the black male body ... In London, Mendez describes every home, pub, toilet, and restaurant in forensic detail, with an awareness of class signifiers and small details that is both entertaining and moving. Occasionally, the equation made between wealth and apparent goodness is too blunt, but for Jesse comfortable, pristine homes signify safety and love, and his history accounts for his quick judgement ... a bold and raw novel, and although some edges still need sanding down it is memorable and affecting. There is one stretch in the middle where the prose is fine, fluid and luminous.
Gaël Faye, Trans. by Sarah Ardizzone
RaveThe Guardian...this is is a book that demanded to be written, not only to mark the lives lost in Burundi and Rwanda, but also to show the way in which violence can take hold of a nation ... captures the physical, social, sensual and political reality of Burundi as seen through the eyes of a boy who wants to maintain his innocence.
Aida Edemariam
PositiveThe GuardianWe first meet Yètèmegnu in the years before the Italian invasion in 1935, as a child of nine betrothed to a cleric more than two decades her senior. It is with a deft, subtle touch that Edemariam portrays both the contemporary celebration of the event and the deeper tragedy of it ... This is a loving portrait of a grandmother, undiminished by the distances between the author and her subject. Edemariam takes the facts of Yètèmegnu’s life – her illiteracy, her isolation, her submission to her husband and to [Haile] Selassie – and goes beyond them.
