Broken Glass

A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence -- Melissa McClements * Financial Times * Broken Glass is a comic romp that releases Mabanckou's sense of humour... Although its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou's jokes work the whole spectrum of humour -- Tibor Fischer * Guardian * Deserves the acclaim heaped upon it... self-mocking and ironic, a thought-provoking glimpse into a stricken country * Waterstone's Books Quarterly * Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur... the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator's rhetorical extravagances... With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion -- Peter Carty * Independent * This bar-room yarn-spinner tells his fellow tipplers' tales in a voice that swings between broad farce and aching tragedy. His farewell performance from a perch in "Credit Gone West" abounds in scorching wit and flights of eloquence... vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence. -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent * A book of grubby erudition... full of tall tales that can entertain readers from Brazzaville to Bognor. -- James Smart * Guardian * Selected as one of the 100 best books of the 21st century * The Guardian *

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in the Congo. He currently lives in California, where he teaches French literature at UCLA. One of Africa's major writers, he is the author of six volumes of poetry and six novels. He received the prestigious Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine. He was selected by the French journal Lire as one of the fifty writers to watch out for this coming century. He was awarded the Grand Prix de la Littrature in 2012 and in 2015 was listed as a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.