So Distant From My Life

Jeanphi, a young man from Ouabany, is obsessed with migration and takes an illegal route across the Sahara to Morocco, where he meets an elegant French widower. Monique Ilboudos novel offers a compelling and complex portrait of migration and a critique of the NGO-isation of African countries and the currents of shame that divide communities and families.

Format: Paperback / softback
Publication date: 27 October 2022
Publisher: Tilted Axis Press

One of The Observers fiction picks for 2022 and winner of a PEN Heim award, Jeanphi is a young man from the fictional West African city of Ouabany who is obsessed with migration. He scrapes together money to take the illegal route across the Sahara, making it as far as Morocco before being repatriated. Increasingly desperate, Jeanphi meets an elegant French widower who is despairing at the insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles for his charitable endeavour in Jeanphis country. A window opens to opportunity, but it will also bring tragedy.

Burkinabé author Monique Ilboudos novel offers a compelling and complex portrait of migration, one of the defining global concerns of the twenty-first century, and a sharp critique of both the NGO-isation of African countries and the currents of shame that divide communities and families. Yarri Kamara has rendered Ilboudos text in an idiom that conveys the sharp humour, lucid descriptions, and urgency of the original.

ISBN-13: 9781911284802