White: A Novel

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From the celebrated author of the ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping(Phil Klay)Into the Suncomesa subversive, daring, and at times satiricalnovel exploringprivilege, humanitarianism, white supremacy, and the absurdity of American exceptionalism.

Assigned to write an expos on Richmond Hew, one of the most elusive and corrupt figures in the conservation world, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But when he meets Sola, a woman searching for a rootless white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon, he slowly uncovers a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making.

This harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saintsand straight to the heart of his own complicity. An anthropologist who treats orphans like test subjects. A community of charismatic Congolese preachers. Street children who share accounts of abandonment and sexual abuse. A renowned and revered conservationist who vanishes. And then there is the journalist himself, lost in his own misunderstanding of privilege and the myth of whiteness, and plagued by traumatic memories of his father. At first seemingly unrelated, these disparate elements coalesce one by one into a map of Richmond Hews movements.

Reviews

Praise for White A compelling literary fantasia . . . Deni Ellis Bchards fifth book blends fiction, literary and cultural criticism, parody and memoir . . . it is as unsettling as it is thought-provoking.Minneapolis Star Tribune A tale that feel like James Michener and Gabriel Garcia Mrquez joined forces to craft a meditation on race. . . . In White, there is nothing clean cut about the way whiteness manifests in geopolitics . . . Captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical, this is intelligent entertainment.Foreword Reviews (starred review) "White's self-aware, self-immolating interrogation of colonialism, whiteness, and fiction makes for a smart and dizzying feat of writing."Meridian Bechards richly nuanced prose and vividly drawn characters make captivating reading while offering provocative food for thought about humanitarianism, corruption, and racial tensions in Africa.Booklist Remarkable . . . White is a thriller, an adventure story, a literary novel that interrogates what the possession of whiteness means to those seen as white. His novel also crosses the boundary of the what defines a novel.Signature Praise for Into the Sun Into the Sun is a ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping portrait of the expatriate community in Kabulthe idealists, mercenaries, aid workers, and journalists circling around a war offering them promises of purpose, redemption, or cash, while the local Afghans in their orbit negotiate the ever-changing and ever-dangerous politics of the latter stages of the American war in Afghanistan. Brilliant.Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment Into the Sun is the sort of book Im always hungry forthe serious novel in which the guns literally go off. Bchard makes me think of Graham Greene and Robert Stone, which is heady company, indeed.Richard Ford Into the Sun is an ambitious novel that succeeds on all levels. Its a riveting mystery-thriller that also probes deeper into the nature of war and the ways in which it attracts and transforms some people. Into the Sun has the propulsive force of a car bomb in the bloodstream, quickening the readers pulse at every turn, right up to the very last page.David Abrams, author of Fobbit Praise for Of Bonobos and Men Of Bonobos and Men is the embodiment of the type of reporting that we dream of reading, but all too rarely encounterintelligent, engaged, and above all, astonishingly perceptive. Here is a portrait of a nation and the conservationists trying to protect it, rendered with all the necessary complexity to make this book joyously alive.Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Here is the matter of conservation given profound explanationa searching and knowing consideration that enables an important social and political and cultural struggle in Africa to become a needed lesson for us who live elsewhere to ponder, take to heart.Robert Coles Journalist Bchard, a foreign correspondent familiar with war zones, probes beneath headlines describing the Congo as a country of such inhumanity that we find it incomprehensible and finds another, more hopeful reality. . . . Bchards adventurous travels in the Congo offer spice to this rich, complex account.Kirkus For this absorbing report on the BCIs innovative methods, renowned journalist Bchard mingled with Congo villagers and BCI fieldworkers, observing how the conservationists forged alliances with villagers to build new schools and create jobs. In a country torn by unremitting military strife and rapacious mining, BCIs work has also helped slow rain-forest destruction. Bchards masterful, adventure-driven reporting delivers an inspiring account of an all-too-rare ecological success story.Booklist A vivid, inspiring book, imbued with Bchards keen eye for detail.Maisonneuve Praise for Cures for Hunger You havent read a story like this one, even if your father was the kind of magnificent scoundrel you only find in Russian novels. Bchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story. Just because the end is clear doesnt mean the bets are off.Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings Bchard writes that prison taught his father the nature of the self, the way it can be shaped and hardened. As in a great novel, this darkly comic and lyrical memoir demonstrates the shaping of its author, who suffers the wreckage of his fathers life, yet manages to salvage all the beauty of its desperate freedoms. Bchards poetic gifts give voice to the outsiders of society, and make them glow with humanity and love.Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen Bchard has created a moving story of rootlessness, rebellion, lost love, criminal daring, regret, and restless searching. Driven above all by the need to grasp his fathers secrets, he has written his narrative in skillful, resonant prose graced with a subtle tone of obsession and longing.Leonard Gardner, author of Fat City Cures for Hunger is a poignant adventure story with a mystery. . . . But it is also, perhaps even more so, the story of an artist coming of age. Readers will be reminded of James Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.Cleveland Plain Dealer A poignant but rigorously unsentimental account of hard-won maturity.Kirkus Cures for Hunger is flush with tenderness. . . . Much more than a memoir of youthful misadventure, though it contains plenty of that. Its also an exploration of the oppression of lineage, of familial duty, wanderlust, and perennial dissatisfaction, and the most American theme of them all: personal reinvention.Iowa Review Praise for Vandal Love A strange and beautiful first novel. . . . A sculpted artifact, built sentence by luminous, surprising sentence.Minneapolis Star Tribune A novel youll want to read slowly, savoring prose thats both lyrical and gritty, able to evoke big emotions with exquisite intimacy.O, The Oprah Magazine This is both a road novel and a voyage through time, with each of the books two parts covering the lifetimes of several family members in an examination of the Herve lineage. Ruminations abound on sex, violence, and the bonds between people. This fiction debut, unfolding in punchy prose, recalls Marquez with a French-Canadian twist.Publishers Weekly In Vandal Love Bechard has reinvented the generational novel with innovative brilliance. The book has all the quirky depth of a great HBO series and a line-to-line literary energy that is very rare. This is an enormously impressive debut by a clearly gifted writer.Robert Olen Butler Vandal Love is a lyrical, generational story of a family haunted by God who is not above, but is naturewho is in the chromosomes that make for big and small, strong and weak, who is inside exquisitely cruel and hard journeys, who is the squeak of snow under boots in Quebec, or a mosquitoed sweat on a bare, muscled boxer in Louisiana. Reminiscent of Proulx and Doctorow in both sweep and grace of prose, it is hard to believe that Vandal Love, so elegant and accomplished, is only Bechards first novel.Dagoberto Gilb Over a vast yet beautifully coherent canvas, Vandal Love follows the panic and privilege of human longing through an amazing coalition of loneliness and adaptation. These charactersinjured but unbowed, broken but enduringintroduce a gifted new writer. Bchards surety of voice and confident narrative span declare a first rate novel and an eloquent debut.Commonwealth Judging Panel, 2007

Author Bio

Deni Ellis Bchard is the author of five other books: Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Cures for Hunger, a memoir; Of Bonobos and Men, winner of the 2015 Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism; Into the Sun, winner of the 2017 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction; and Kuei, My Friend: A Conversation on Racism and Reconciliation, an epistolary book coauthored with First Nations poet Natasha Kanap-Fontaine. His articles, fiction, and photos have been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including the LA Times, Salon, Reuters, the Paris Review, the Guardian, Patagonia, La Repubblica, the Walrus, Pacific Standard, Le Devoir, Vanity Fair Italia, the Herald Scotland, the Huffington Post, the Harvard Review, the National Post, and Foreign Policy. He has reported from India, Cuba, Rwanda, Colombia, Iraq, the Congo, and Afghanistan.