The Lights of Pointe-Noire

Praise for Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Henri Gal for his body of work. He has also received the Subsaharan African Literature Prize for Blue-White-Red, and the Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine, which is published by Serpent’s Tail along with his other novels, Black Bazaar, Broken Glass and African Psycho.

‘Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect’ Man International Booker Prize judges’ citation

‘Africa’s Samuel Beckett … Mabanckou is a subversive … [his] freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat’ Economist

‘A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence’ Financial Times

‘Scorching wit and flights of eloquence … vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

‘A novelist of exuberant originality … [Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty is a] delightful comic novel in which the boy narrator’s ingenuousness is teamed with a sly authorial wit … its seductive charm and intelligence recentre the world’ Maya Jaggi, Guardian

‘Mabanckou’s novels about life in Africa have won much acclaim. Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, a fictionalised account of his childhood in Congo-Brazzaville, is perhaps his best yet … Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio likens Mabanckou to Céline, Chinua Achebe, JD Salinger and Réjean Ducharme. Such a varied list suggests that he is, in fact, incomparable’ Financial Times

‘[African Psycho is] Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation … a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time’ Time Out New York

‘[Memoirs of a Porcupine] subverts stereotypical notions of African literature, setting cliché and shibboleths on collision course. Magical realism meets black comedy in an excellent satire by an inventive and playful writer’ Herald