The Barefoot Woman [Paperback]

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

A moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgotten.

The story of the author's mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother's voice in a haunting work of art. Radiant with love... The Barefoot Womanpowerfully continues the tradition of women’s work it so lovingly recounts. In Mukasonga’s village, the women were in charge of the fire. They stoked it, kept it going all night, every night. In her work — six searing books and counting — she has become the keeper of the flame. —The New York Times

A profoundly affecting memoir of a mother lost to ethnic violence. . . A loving, urgent memorial to people now deep in the jumble of some ossuary who might otherwise be forgotten in time. — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

This is an important book written for a strong and loving woman. — BOOKish(A Must Read Fiction Selection)

Mukasonga is a master of subtle shifts in register — a skill inherited, perhaps, from the Rwandan traditions of intricate courtesy and assiduous privacy that Stefania maintained. She turns everything over restlessly: In her prose, poignant reminiscences sharpen into bitter ironies, or laments reveal flashes of comedy, determination, defiance. — The New York Times Book Review

The Barefoot Woman is simultaneously a powerful work of witness and memorial, a loving act of reconstruction, and an unflinching reckoning with the Rwandan Civil War. In sentences of great beauty and lĂ`