3 Books Published by Europa Editions on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

A polyphonic tale of immigration and community by "the most promising Senegalese writer of his generation" (Le Monde) and winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt

Seventy-two men arrive in the middle of the Sicilian countryside. They are "immigrants," "refugees" or "migrants." But in Altino, they’re called the "ragazzi," the "guys" that the Santa Marta Association have taken responsibility for. Their arrival changes everybody’s life in this small Sicilian town.

While they wait to know their fate, the ragazzi encounter all kinds of people: a strange vicar who rewrites their pasts, a woman committed to ensuring them asylum, a man determined to fight against it, an older ragazzo who has become an interpreter, and a reclusive poet who no longer writes.

Each character in this moving and important saga is forced to reflect on what it means to encounter people they know nothing about. They watch as a situation unfolds over which they have little control or insight. A story told through a growing symphony of voices that ends only when one final voice brings silence to the choir.

Winner of the French Voices Grand Prize, Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, and Grand Prix du Roman Métis

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s searing and thought-provoking debut novel, Brotherhood takes place in the imaginary town of Kalep, where a fundamentalist Islamist government has spread its brutal authority.

Under the regime of the so-called Brotherhood, two young people are publicly executed for having loved each other. In response, their mothers begin a secret correspondence, their only outlet for the grief they share and each woman’s personal reckoning with a leadership that would take her beloved child’s life.

At the same time, spurred on by their indignation at what seems to be an escalation of The Brotherhood’s brutality, a band of intellectuals and free-thinkers seeks to awaken the conscience of the cowed populace and foment rebellion by publishing an underground newspaper. While they grapple with the implications of what they have done, the regime’s brutal leader begins a personal crusade to find the responsible parties, and bring them to his own sense of justice.

In this brilliant analysis of tyranny and brutality, Mbougar Sarr explores the ways in which resistance and heroism can often give way to cowardice, all while giving voice to the moral ambiguities and personal struggles involved in each of his characters’ search to impose the values they hold most dear.

Poet, short story writer, and novelist Ian Williams was named one of "ten Canadian writers to watch out for" by CBC in 2018. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. He won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for his short stories. Williams holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Reproduction, his debut novel, was a finalist for the Amazon first novel prize, was a CBC Spring & Black History Month pick, and dubbed one of the "Buzziest Books of 2019" by Chatelaine Magazine.