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At night all blood is black / David Diop.

At night all blood is black / David Diop.
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Adult fiction   Armidale . Available .  
. Catalogue Record 257704 ItemInfo Beginning of record . Catalogue Record 257704 ItemInfo Top of page .
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ISBN 9781782277538 (paperback)
Author Diop, David, 1966-
Title At night all blood is black / David Diop.
Publication London : Pushkin Press, 2021.
©2021.
Physical description 160 pages ; 20 cm.
Notes 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 rumours 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 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, this is a dazzling tale of a man's descent into madness.
Languages In English. Translated from the French.
Subject World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Western Front -- Fiction
Soldiers -- France -- Fiction
Senegalese -- Fiction
Revenge -- Fiction
Mental illness -- Fiction
Genre/Form War stories
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Catalogue Information 257704 Beginning of record . Catalogue Information 257704 Top of page .