ABOUT
THE BOOK

Moving between Senegal and France, Three Strong Women is composed of three linked stories, each with a remarkable heroine at its heart: resilient, resourceful women who face numerous battles against the society and culture in which they live – but also against themselves. Although it tackles weighty, contemporary issues such as migration and identity, the novel never loses its stylistic ambitions, nor its intimacy; it is a work of genuine grace and power.

Forty-year-old Norah leaves Paris, her family and her career as a lawyer to visit her father in Dakar. It is an uncomfortable reunion – she is asked to use her skills as a lawyer to get her brother out of prison – and ultimately the trip endangers her marriage and her relationship with her own daughter, and drives her to the very edge of madness.

Fanta, on the other hand, leaves Dakar to follow her husband Rudy to rural France. And it is through Rudy’s bitter and guilt-ridden perspective that we see Fanta stagnate with boredom in this alien, narrow environment.

Khady is forced into exile from Senegal because of poverty, because her husband is dead, because she is lonely and in despair. With other illegal immigrants, she embarks on a journey which takes her nowhere, but from which she will never return.