The book
A polyphonic tale of immigration and community by the winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt
Seventy-two men arrive in the Sicilian countryside. They are “immigrants”, “refugees” or “migrants”. But in Altino, they are called the ragazzi, the ‘guys’ that the Santa Marta Association have taken responsibility for. And their presence changes the course of life in this small Sicilian town.
While they await their fate, the ragazzi encounter all kinds of people: a strange vicar who rewrites their pasts, a woman committed to offering them asylum, a man determined to refuse it, an older ragazzo who has become an interpreter, and a reclusive poet who no longer writes.
Each character, wherever they may come from, is forced to reflect on what it means to meet people they know nothing about. As each brings a different view, a cacophony of discordant voices resonates to the end, when the final one reduces the choir to silence.
The author
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was born in Senegal in 1990. Brotherhood (Terre ceinte), received the Ahmadou Kourouma literary prize as well as the Grand Prix du Roman Métis. In 2018, he became the youngest writer to have been awarded the World Literature Prize, for his second novel Silence du choeur. An extract from his third novel, De purs hommes, was published in Granta Magazine in 2019. He currently lives in Paris. He runs a blog: http://chosesrevues.over-blog.com/