Alain Mabanckou’s poetic carnival of a novel chronicles a riotous journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld in late 20th century Congo-Brazzaville. Translated by Helen Stephenson.1970, the People’s Republic of Congo. In an orphanage near the bustling port of Pointe-Noire, Moses is terrorised by a pair of twins and, worse, the corrupt director. United against this common enemy, the three orphans escape to Pointe-Noire and join the Congolese Merry Men, a gang of petty thieves grifting among the Zairean prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But as the authorities continue to hound the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls, all this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. "Its ebullient humour recalls Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, Mabanckou’s fictionalised autobiography of growing up in the 1970s under a Marxist-Leninist regime. Yet unlike in that buoyantly mischievous child’s-eye satire, the laughter here has an undertow of grief, outrage and survivor’s guilt ... [a] picaresque tour-de-force...&nbsp;Yet there is also a touching personal homage in this retelling of the lives of some of those unable to escape the asylum."&nbsp; -&nbsp; Maya Jaggi, The GuardianAlain Mabanckou's first novel was published in 1998, and since then he has published regularly, writing novels, essays, and poetry, and becoming one of the best-known novelists in France.&nbsp;He won the Renaudot Prize for Memoires of a Porcupine in 2006, and he has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize twice: once in 2015, when the prize was for a body of work, and once in 2017 for a single novel, Black Moses.&nbsp;

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