“In an early scene from Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s novel, two characters sit together, blowing cigarette smoke at each other. The daughter, Blanche, has returned home to Rwanda after three years living in France. Imaculata, her mother, has survived the Rwandan genocide... It’s a melancholy image, the distance between two characters crossed only by their exhaled breath, and one which sets up a major theme of the novel: the attempt to communicate. As a story that crosses four generations of a family, it looks at how communication breaks down, and how these ties might be repaired.”
Read the full review in Litro Magazine.
