Young Gabriel's life in Burundi is upended when adjacent Rwanda erupts hideously in flames. Based on songwriter/rapper Faye's own experiences, this debut novel captured numerous awards in France and has been sold to 30 territories.

The death of innocence seen through the eyes of Gabriel, our beguiling 11-year-old narrator, is at the heart of this gorgeous first novel, which earned the Prix Goncourt des lycéens in France. A mixed-race child, with a French father and a Rwandan mother, Gaby lives in idyllic surroundings. With his posse of friends and his sister, Ana, he joyfully roams the neighborhood on his bike, sneaks cigarettes in an abandoned minivan, and steals lush mangos to sell for mad money. But Gaby is also a precocious observer and avid reader, curious about the larger world outside the small East African nation of Burundi. In 1993, when the first democratically elected president is assassinated, Gabriel's friends suddenly see differences between the Hutu and Tutsi neighbors with whom they've interacted all their lives, exhorting a reluctant Gabriel to choose a side. As the world he's known disintegrates around him, Gabriel escapes from reality by finding comfort in books, until the horrors of genocide ravage his own family and he can no longer look away. VERDICT Echoing the work of Ishmael Beah, first novelist Faye eloquently speaks to the untenable choices, among love of country, family, or survival, that victims in conflict zones are forced to make. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Faye debuts a precise and potent voice in his deeply affecting novel about coming of age during the mid-1990s Tutsi genocide. Ten-year-old Gabriel has a peaceful, mischievous childhood marred only by the growing rift between his French father and Rwandan mother. He and his friends roam the streets of their well-heeled neighborhood in the Burundi capital of Bujumbura, stealing mangos and avoiding the bully Francis; Gabriel daydreams about moving to France to be with his pen pal crush Laure. But then Burundi's first democratic elections in 1993 sputter into a military coup, while rumors of impending civil war across the border in Rwanda stoke ethnic tensions among Gabriel's peers and the entire city. Gabriel's mother crosses the border to seek news of her Tutsi family and returns traumatized; Gabriel retreats into voracious reading as his friends get involved with guerrilla warfare. Faye includes a range of individuals representing the economic and racial complexities of postcolonial Africa. The most powerful moments come as Gabriel stumbles through processing his alarming new realities with delayed understanding. The juxtaposition of everyday growing pains and the fallout from atrocities is heightened by Faye's lovely prose, which builds a heartrending portrait of the end of childhood. (June)