Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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the National Book Awards
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Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. His four novels have been published in ten languages, and he has translated more than 60 books from the French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, and Marcel Proust’s The Seventy-Five Folios. More about this author >
David Diop was born in Paris and was raised in Senegal. He is a professor of 18th-century literature at the University of Pau. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
Translated from the French
From the publisher:
Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman’s name: Maram.
The key to this mysterious woman’s identity is Adanson’s unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée—a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade—to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart.
