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Your next favorite book
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by Carl de Souza
"This isn't a night for theater. All the drama will be outside."
In 1999, the Mauritian musician Joseph Réginald Topize, better known as Kaya, was arrested for smoking weed while performing at a concert. Following his death in police custody just days later, the island nation surged with violence in a long-overdue demand for justice from the marginalized populations of the African island off the coast of Madagascar.
In Kaya Days, the spirit of the island and its many people―Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, Franco-Mauritian, and Creole―is distilled into a young woman's daylong search through the uproar for her younger brother, who has gone missing. Amid burning cars and buildings, opportunists and revolutionaries, Santee rises into another world, a furious, brilliant one. An exhilarating journey into night from a small Hindu village to the big city, and from innocence into womanhood, Carl de Souza's surreal English-language debut, artfully translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, is an explosion of politics and poetry, a humid dream-world of revolutionary fervor where seemingly anything―everything―is possible.
"Electric…De Souza's unpredictable, propulsive tale is a rip-roaring trip teeming with beauty, anger, possibility, and helplessness." ―Publishers Weekly
"An electrifying portrait of a tiny island nation on fire." ―Kirkus Reviews
"A frantic, stream-of-consciousness novel in which a teenager comes of age in the middle of violent upheaval." ―Foreword Reviews
This information about Kaya Days was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Carl de Souza is a Mauritian novelist, short story writer, and academic. He began writing in French around 1980, with Halley's La Cométe receiving the Pierre Renaud Prize in Mauritius in 1986. His works are based on the history of Mauritius and its people. Kaya Days, a dramatization of the race riots following the death of the seggae singer Kaya, will be published by Two Lines Press in 2021 in translation from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman. It is his first work to be translated into English. He lives in Mont Piton, Mauritius.
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