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Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. An award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. His six novels African Psycho, Memoirs of a Porcupine, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar, Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty – a fictionalised retelling of Mabanckou’s childhood in Congo – and his most recent, Black Moses, are all published by Serpent’s Tail. Among his many honours are the Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine, a Prix Goncourt shortlisting for Black Moses, and the Académie Française’s Grand prix de littérature, awarded in recognition of his entire literary career. His memoir The Lights of Pointe-Noire won the 2016 French Voices Award and was described by Salman Rushdie as ‘a beautiful book’. He is a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur and an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, was a finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize and has featured on Vanity Fair’s list of France’s fifty most influential people.

Praise for African Psycho

‘A morbid parody of the serial-killer genre that owes as much to Albert Camus’s The Outsider as to Bret Easton Ellis … insisting on laughter in the midst of desperation, [Mabanckou] sugars the pill of criticism with humour that veers from the gently ironic to the bawdy or macabre’ Economist

‘This is Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation … a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time’ Time Out, New York

‘A macabre but comical take on a would-be serial killer’ Vanity Fair

‘A smart satire on the deserving targets of corrupt officialdom, complacent media and blank-eyed consumerism’ New Internationalist

‘Mabanckou manages to write playfully about an alarming subject’ Financial Times

‘Energetic, terrifically powerful writing’ Harriett Gilbert, BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read

Praise for Alain Mabanckou

‘Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect’ Man Booker International Prize judges’ citation

‘A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence’ Financial Times

‘A hugely engaging storyteller whose humour, mischief and sheer bravura only throw the melancholy of his forlorn migrant heroes into even bolder relief … Mabanckou conjures a world where ragged modernisation coincides with tentacular kin networks and traditional lore’ Independent

‘An inventive and playful writer’ Herald

‘Mabanckou’s rhythmic and lyrical lines draw us into his characters and communities at a tempo that mirrors the speed of speech’ Australian

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com

First published in 2003 by Le Serpent à Plumes, France
First published in this translation in 2007 by
Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, New York

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 84765 473 1