Awards
- Short-listed for The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize 2003 (Canada)
Overview
In the middle of Kigali is a swimming pool at the Hôtel des Mille-Collines. It is a magnet for a privileged group of residents, a place where middle-class Rwandans drink with melancholy expatriates and prostitutes. But beyond the walls of the hotel exists a chaotic society in which millions live in poverty, surrounded by violence and disease. In this troubled world, Valcourt, a Canadian journalist, falls for Gentille, a beautiful Hutu waitress. A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a poignant love story, a stirring hymn to humanity and a modern classic of spellbinding power, confronting the nightmare that ravaged Rwanda in the 1990s.
Full Product Details
Author: Gil Courtemanche ,
Giles Foden ,
Patricia Claxton
Publisher: Canongate Books
Imprint: Canongate Canons
Edition: Main - Canons Reissue
Dimensions:
Width: 12.90cm
, Height: 1.60cm
, Length: 19.80cm
Weight: 0.213kg
ISBN: 9781782118886
ISBN 10: 1782118888
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 03 May 2018
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Language: English
Reviews
Courtemanche's time in Rwanda, where he worked as a journalist, may have produced the first great novel of the catastrophe that befell that country * * Guardian * * An intense affair, urgent and nerve-wrackingly ominous, with a surprisingly boisterous humour * * Financial Times * * Intense and gut-wrenching, poetic and disquieting * * Observer * * Courtemanche's work has an enormous quality . . . Read this book * * Spectator * * Illuminating and horrifying, compassionate and scathing * * Times Literary Supplement * * Brilliant, beautiful, upsetting, angry, seductive, impassioned, polemical and horrifying * * Herald * * Astounding . . . It's no surprise that this book has won so many prizes * * Daily Mail * * This powerful and astonishing novel is one of the most important to be set in Africa since Camus' The Plague * * Scotsman * * Very powerful . . . I urge you to read it * * Literary Review * * Courtemanche evokes with skill the cynical, impotent world of Kigali ex-pats and the senselessness of the terror * * GQ * *
Author Information
Gil Courtemanche was born in Montreal in 1943 and died in 2011. A journalist, broadcaster, writer and filmmaker in international and third-world politics, he was the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, and made the award-winning documentary The Gospel of AIDS. Courtemanche won the National Magazine Award for political reporting and was a consultant for the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. Patricia Claxton is one of Canada's foremost translators, winning her first Governor General's Award for translation in 1987 for La Detresse et L'Enchantement by Gabrielle Roy, and her second in 1999 for Francois Ricard's biography of the same writer.
