DEALING WITH THE DEAD

207pp., paperback Serpent's Tail, London, 2025

ISBN: 9781800817708

First published in French in 2022 as La Commerce des Allongés. Translated from the French by Helen Stevenson.

Dead at the age of twenty-four, Liwa Ekimakingaï meets the other residents of Frère Lachaise cemetery, all of whom have their own stories of life and death.

Against all ghostly advice, Liwa decides to go back to his childhood home in Pointe-Noire to see his grandmother one last time. Disturbing rumours and political corruption mix with his jumbled memories of his last night on earth as he tries to solve the riddle of his untimely death.

"Exuberant ... Dealing with the Dead is often damning, frequently hilarious and always compassionate. At just 200 pages, Helen Stevenson's translation from the French performs supple shifts between registers and keeps the story moving at lightning pace. It's the work of a writer who, in exile, has poured his indignation and longing for home into a novel that transports his readers there and immerses us in its complexities" Financial Times

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo and currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He is the author of seven previous novels including Black Moses and African Psycho. 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.