Gael Faye Press Reviews
an excellent novel, a model of restraint and quiet literary sophistication - Sunday Times
Precise and potent...deeply affecting... 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 - Publishers Weekly
Gael Faye is a revelation. Small Country is a luminous and poignant novel about childhood, war, exile and identity... this is literature at its most powerful - Le Parisien Magazine
A melancholic tale of a paradise lost - Grazia
What is autobiographical, and what imagined? In the end it doesn't matter, when he Gael Faye gives life to the lost land of his childhood, with poetry and modesty - Agence France Presse Mondiales
Small Country is a stirring and graceful tale of stolen innocence and fragmented identity. Hopeful, raw and deeply human, it is a modern classic in the making. - France Today
About Gael Faye
French-Rwandan Gael Faye is an author, composer and hip hop artist. He was born in 1982 in Burundi, and has a Rwandan mother and French father. In 1995, after the outbreak of the civil war and the Rwandan genocide, the family moved to France. Gael studied finance and worked in London for two years for an investment fund, then he left London to embark on a career of writing and music. He is as influenced by Creole literature as he is by hip hop culture, and released an album in 2010 with the group Milk Coffee & Sugar. In 2013, his first solo album, Pili Pili sur un Croissant au Beurre, appeared. It was recorded between Bujumbura and Paris, and is filled with a plethora of musical influences: rap laced with soul and jazz, semba, Congolese rumba... In 2018 he received the prestigious Victoires de la Musique Award. Small Country is his first novel. It was a huge bestseller in France, winning the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens 2016, and is being published in thirty territories worldwide.
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