Book of the Month

Book of the Month January 2024

Quizlit’s Book of the Month January 2024 is The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Thanks to a sparkling translation from Lara Vergnaud, we can now enjoy Sarr’s wonderful novel, winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize.

Book of the Month January 2024

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Paris, 2018. Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book titled The Maze of Inhumanity. It has an immediate hold over him. No one knows what happened to the author, T.C. Elimane, who was accused of plagiarism, his reputation destroyed by the critics.

Obsessed with discovering the truth about Elimane’s disappearance, Faye weaves past and present, countries and continents, following the author’s labyrinthine trail from Senegal to Argentina and France and confronting the great tragedies of history.

Will he get to the truth at the centre of the maze?

A gripping literary quest novel and a masterpiece of perpetual reinvention, The Most Secret Memory of Men confronts the impact of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the holocaust in Europe, dictatorships in South America and the Caribbean, genocide in Africa, and collaboration and resistance everywhere. Above all, it is a love song to literature and its timeless power.

Book of the Month January 2024 — Get a Copy

“Captivating, precise, sensual prose. A book that will stir your emotions and make you think. A love letter to literature, this novel is already a classic and it will haunt you.” —Leïla Slimani

“Thanks to translator Lara Vergnaud, English-language readers can seamlessly experience Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s pyrotechnic prose. A labyrinth of a novel, The Most Secret Memory of Men is as enthralling as it is thought-provoking. Sarr is a writer that comes along once in a lifetime.” —Eric Nguyen

“A rollicking literary mystery…an aerobatic feat of narrative invention, whirling between noir, fairy tale, satire, and archival fiction in its self-reflexive meditation on the nature of literary legend…propulsive.” —The New Yorker

Here at Quizlit, this was one of our favorite books of 2023, an exhilarating and fascinating read, beautifully written, by an author bursting with talent. A worthy choice for our Book of the Month January 2024

About Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was born in Dakar in 1990. He studied literature and philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Brotherhood, his first novel, won the Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, and the French Voices Grand Prize, in Alexia Trigo’s translation. In 2021, he won the Prix Goncourt for The Most Secret Memory of Men, becoming the first author from sub-Saharan Africa to win the award and one of the youngest at only thirty-one years old.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr Books to Read in English

Brotherhood

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.