TOMORROW I'LL BE TWENTY, translated by Helen Stevenson

313pp., paperback, First English Language Edition, London, 2013

First published in 2010 in French as Demains J'aurai Vingt. Finalist for the Man Booker Prize 2015.

A comic novel about a ten-year-old boy living with his parents in Pointe Noire in the 1970s.

"This sparkling portrayal of an urban, postcolonial childhood encompasses Chinese doctors, Indian movies, Senegalese shopkeepers and the French who "go on looking after our oil for us". Yet this open world jostles with one the novel gently mocks. When a fetishist decides that Michel holds the key to his mother's womb, and her failure to have a second child, the innocent boy joins forces with a vagabond-philosopher to search the bins for the lost key. The Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio, in an afterword to this translation, brackets Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty with The Catcher in the Rye. Its seductive charm and intelligence recentre the world, so that all readers can indeed become Congolese." Maya Jaggi, Guardian

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo and currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is Professor of French and Francophone studies at UCLA. His earlier novels include Black Moses, African Psycho, Memoirs of a Porcupine, Broken Glass and Black Bazaar. He has been awarded the Académie Française's Grand Prix de literature and the 2016 French Voices Award for his memoir The Lights of Pointe-Noire.