Broken Glass

“Mabanckou is one of Africa’s liveliest and most original voices, and this novel pulses with energy and invention.”—The Times of London

let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I—Broken Glass—can turn out a book, because one day, for a laugh, I told him about this famous writer who drank like a fish . . .

In Republic of the Congo, in the town of Trois-Cents, in a bar called Credit Gone West, a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass drinks red wine and records the stories of the bar and its regulars, including Stubborn Snail, the owner, who must battle church people, ex-alcoholics, tribal leaders, and thugs set on destroying him and his business, and the Printer, who had a respectable life in France ruined by a white woman, his wife, and Robinette, who could out-drink and out-piss any man until a skinny-legged stranger challenged her reign, and Broken Glass himself, whose own tale involves as much heartbreak, squalor, disappointment, and delusion. A new edition of an irreverent, allusive, tragicomic masterpiece from one of our greatest living Francophone writers.