Rwandan-French novelist, songwriter, and hip-hop artist Gaël Faye returns with his second novel, Jacaranda, published by Chatto & Windus in the UK and Hogarth Press in the US, and translated into English by Sarah Ardizzone. The book follows Faye’s acclaimed 2016 debut, Small Country, and won France’s Prix Renaudot in 2024, along with the Choix Goncourt across 28 countries.

Jacaranda opens with Milan, the twelve-year-old son of a French father and a Rwandan mother, who blames his failed exams on the emotional weight of the genocide unfolding in his mother’s homeland, even though, growing up outside Paris in the 1990s, that violence reaches him only as an abstraction through television broadcasts. That distance collapses when Milan’s mother introduces him to Claude, a young cousin arriving from Rwanda with a bandaged head for medical treatment; Milan, thrilled to have what feels like a new brother, is left heartbroken when Claude is sent back just as suddenly as he came.

Years later, the two reunite as teenagers, when Milan travels to Rwanda for the first time alongside his mother following her divorce, discovering a community far more fractured and vibrant than he had imagined. The trip raises more questions than it answers about family, war, and their long aftershocks. Milan returns to Rwanda again and again over the years that follow, driven to unearth the secrets buried in his family’s long silences and to imagine what a new future might look like. The novel is partly inspired by Faye’s own relationship with Rwanda, and structured across thirty multivocal chapters spanning roughly thirty-six years, tracing Milan’s slow reconstruction of why his mother, Venancia, has always refused to speak of her Rwandan family.

In a review for the Guardian, Rachel Seiffert calls the book a bold and uncompromising work that follows Faye’s 2016 debut, Small Country, in taking on the seismic weight of the Rwandan genocide and the aftershocks that continue to ripple across generations.

Faye was born in Burundi and now lives in Rwanda; his debut novel, Small Country, received thirteen literary awards including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and has been translated into forty languages. He’s also a recording artist with close to a million monthly listeners on Spotify, having released albums  and EPs including Pili Pili sur un croissant au beurre, Rythme et botanique, Des fleurs, Lundi méchant, and Mauve Jacaranda. Advance praise for the new novel includes words from fellow authors Leïla Slimani and Imbolo Mbue, both drawn to the luminous quality of Faye’s writing.

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