Comrade Papa
By (Author) Gauz
Translated by Frank Wynne
Quercus Publishing
MacLehose Press
24th September 2024
4th July 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Narrative theme: Social issues
National liberation and independence
Paperback
256
Width 128mm, Height 194mm, Spine 22mm
180g
Following the death of his parents, Dabilly, a young white man, seeks a life of colonial adventure in the Cote d'Ivoire. It is 1880 and Dabilly joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes into a coast as yet untouched by colonisation.
A century later and a young Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam begins to research his family history. When he is sent to Cote d'Ivoire to visit his grandmother, he will discover traces of an ancestor he never knew existed.GauZ' looks across continents and centuries to create a portrait of two very different men, tracing the paths and histories that connect them and plunging us deep into the history of colonisation in the Cote d'Ivoire.GauZ' is an Ivorian author, journalist and screenwriter. After studying biochemistry, he moved to Paris as an undocumented student, working as a security guard before returning to the Cote d'Ivoire. His first novel, Standing Heavy, came out in 2014 and won the Prix des libraires Gibert Joseph, and was followed by Comrade Papa, which won the 2019 Prix Ethiophile, and Black Manoo. GauZ' is the editor-in-chief of the satirical economic newspaper News & co, and has written screenplays and documentary films.