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Our Lady of the Nile
  • ISBN: 9781911547884
  • Pages: 224
  • Publisher: Daunt Books
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Translation: Melanie Mauthner

Our Lady of the Nile

Scholastique Mukasonga
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Our Lady of the Nile is a landmark novel about a country divided and a society hurtling towards horror. In gorgeous and devastating prose, Scholastique Mukasonga captures the dreams, ambitions and prejudices of young women growing up as their country falls apart.

‘There is no better lycée than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred metres, the white teachers proudly proclaim.’

Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens, and to protect them from the dangers of the outside world. The young ladies are expected to learn, eat, and live together, presided over by the colonial white nuns.

It is fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and a quota permits only two Tutsi students for every twenty pupils. As Gloriosa, the school’s Hutu queen bee, tries on her parents’ preconceptions and prejudices, Veronica and Virginia, both Tutsis, are determined to find a place for themselves and their history. In the struggle for power and acceptance, the lycée is transformed into a microcosm of the country’s mounting racial tensions and violence. During the interminable rainy season, everything slowly unfolds behind the school’s closed doors: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution.

‘A coming-of-age tale like no other.’ Telegraph

‘Exquisitely measured . . . Mukasonga’s young boarders are proud, sometimes shy, often very funny.’ Financial Times

‘Mukasonga’s masterpiece . . . The novel’s electricity comes from its deceptive lightness, the danse macabre of dorm intrigue on the cusp of Armageddon.’ New York Review of Books



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