Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné’s desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné’s fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end. Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare’s Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama’s uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

Picking up where "The Glass Rainbow" ends, "Creole Belle" finds David Robicheaux recuperating in New Orleans near the site an oil well blowout on the Gulf. Robicheaux is visited by a mysterious visitor and is surprised by what's inside a floating block of ice. Available in a tall Premium Edition.

The adventurous woman nicknamed La Belle Créole is brought to life in this book through the full use of her memoirs, contemporary accounts, and her intimate letters. The fascinating María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, also known as Mercedes, and later the Comtesse Merlin, was a Cuban-born aristocrat who was years ahead of her time as a writer, a socialite, a salon host, and a participant in the Cuban slavery debate. Raised in Cuba and shipped off to live with her socialite mother in Spain at the age of 13, Mercedes triumphed over the political chaos that blanketed Europe in the Napoleonic days, by charming aristocrats from all sides with her exotic beauty and singing voice. She married General Merlin in Napoleon's army and discussed painting with Francisco de Goya. In Paris she hosted the city's premier musical salon where Liszt, Rossini, and great divas of the day performed for Rothschilds, Balzac, and royalty. Celebrated as one of the greatest amateur sopranos of her day, Mercedes also achieved fame as a writer. Her memoirs and travel writings introduced European audiences to 19th-century Cuban society and contributed to the debate over slavery. Mercedes has recently been rediscovered as Cuba's earliest female author and one who deserves a place in the canon of Latin American literature.

A tale of revenge set in the Caribbean, in which the hero gets back at a rich man who stole his love by impregnating her after she becomes the man's wife. The result is tragedy, the woman dying in childbirth. By the author of Black Witch of Salem.

The Louisiana sun beat mercilessly on Nicole St. Claire just as fate, too, had been merciless. The once wealthy, flirtatious belle stood on the auction block to be sold as a servant. Her sensual figure disguised, her glorious titian hair disheveled, she looked like a waif, but she was all woman, trembling when she recognized the highest bidder—idol of her childhood dreams, the owner of plantation Belle Chene. A man of blazing passion, Alex du Villier bought the girl out of pity, but her aqua eyes stirred his soul and her body ignited his blood. She would be the perfect mistress to make him forget his coming marriage to a cold, haughty heiress. Now he intended to teach this innocent beauty that although he had purchased her freedom, he could steal her heart. An affair of burning desires. . . . Under a Creole moon their passion became a wildfire neither could control, driving them to heart-wrenching choices of silken sin . . . or freedom and love.

While rejecting a conception of literature as moral philosophy, or a device for imparting particular morals to the reader through exemplary characters and plots, Maryse Conde has displayed throughout her writing career a strong valorization of literature as ethical critique. This study examines her singular approach to literary commitment as a critical reworking of aesthetic models and modes of interpretation. Focusing on four dominant problematics in Conde's work'history and globalization in La Belle Creole and Moi, Tituba sorciere...noire de Salem, intertextuality and reception in La migration des c'urs and Celanire cou-coupe, trauma and subjectivity in En attendant le bonheur and Desirada, community and ethics in Traversee de la mangrove and Histoire de la femme cannibale'this analysis proposes to elucidate how, and to what ends, Conde engages, and alters, approaches to reading, staging the problematic, yet pragmatic, need to read well. This hermeneutic imperative foregrounds the need to engage with texts, to cannibalize texts while recognizing their fundamental opacity and inexhaustibility, their resistance to the reader's interpretive habits.Nicole Simek is an Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Whitman College. Specializing in French Caribbean literature, Simek's research interests include the intersection of politics and literature in Caribbean fiction, trauma theory, and sociological approaches to literature.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Interpreting through ExampleChapter 1. Reading History: The Example of the Past after GlobalizationChapter 2. Rusing with the Canon: Insolent Imitation, Parodic IntertextualityChapter 3. Writing Violence: Collective Traumas, Singular PastsChapter 4. The Cannibal Reader: Digesting the Other, Interpreting CommunityConclusion. Comme un Indien Tupinamba...BibliographyIndex

Ivan and Ivana are twins with a bond so strong they become afraid of their feelings. As young adults in Paris, Ivana joins the police while Ivan walks the path of radicalisation. Unable to live with or without each other, become perpetrator and victim in a wave of violent attacks. With her most impressive novel to date, this master storyteller offers an impressive picture of a colourful yet turbulent 21st century.