
Beyond the Door of No Return
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal’s oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Sam
Taylor
Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. His four novels have been published in ten languages, and he has translated more than sixty books from the French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, and Marcel Proust’s The Seventy-Five Folios. He grew up in England, spent a decade in France, and now lives in the United States.
Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. His four novels have been published in ten languages, and he has translated more than sixty books from the French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, and Marcel Proust’s The Seventy-Five Folios. He grew up in England, spent a decade in France, and now lives in the United States.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
On his deathbed, French 18th-century botanist Michel Adanson decides to leave his daughter the notebooks describing his journey to Senegal when he was a young researcher. Senegal was a French colony at the time and slave trade was at its peak. His research on plant life was supported by slave holders and he was only interested in a project of encyclopaedia until he heard of a kidnapped young woman, Maram. She was rumoured to have escaped after being sold into slavery and shipped off to America. She was supposed to hide in a small village where Michel decided to go and find her with the help of a young black boy, Ndiak and several Senegalese men. Their long and dangerous trip changed his life and his view on slavery. In a multi-layered story, David Diop recreates the atmosphere and setting of colonial Senegal in a vivid way. We are really transported back to the 1700s. He draws brilliant portraits of selfish, prejudiced and arrogant White people who profited from slavery. He also shows how a man can change when he comes to know a new people, their culture, creeds and language. Indeed, Michel soon realized the cruelty of racism and questioned the horrors of slavery, even rejecting his own upbringing. We discover the plight of Maram through the eyes of Michel who became obsessed with her. Part historical novel, part tragedy, David Diop’s moving novel highlights little-known aspects of colonialism and recalls that Gorée Island was the place from where slaves where trafficked, a « door of no return ». This is also a cruel fairytale about transmission, betrayal and revenge, family secrets and guilt.