*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE**ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS
OF 2021* Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN
Literary AwardAstonishingly good. -Lily Meyer NPR So incantatory and visceral I don't think
I'll ever forget it. -Ali Smith The Guardian Best Books of 2020 One of The Wall Street
Journal's 11 best books of the fall One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 A Sunday
Times best book of the year Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des
Lycéens David Diop's English-language historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is
a powerful hypnotic and dark novel (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the
trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who never before having left
his village finds himself fighting as a so-called Chocolat soldier with the French army during
World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop in the same regiment is seriously injured in battle
Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man's
Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing madness creeps into Alfa's mind as he comes to see
this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find
forgiveness for himself he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines
to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier and every night he returns to base unharmed
with the German's severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa's deeds with admiration but
soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn't a hero but a sorcerer a
soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front and to separate him from his
growing collection of hands but how does one reason with a demon and how far will Alfa go to
make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic this remarkable novel
fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling
traditions with the gritty day-to-day journalistic horror of life in the trenches David
Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man's descent into madness.
