Pariahs

This haunting and elegiac novel provides a moving portrayal of the modern world encroaching on the old ways in sub-Saharan Africa as told from the alternating voices of a father in prison and his son on the outside struggling to survive. Writing letters to his deceased wife from the confines of a prison cell, the father reflects romantically on their life together and the free-spirited nomadic life that they enjoyed in their youth; while the son, left to fend for himself in an increasingly hostile  and modernized urban environment falls into petty crime and gang life to survive in the hardscrabble slum districts of Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott.

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