Tropic of Violence

Nathacha Appanah returns with a powerful, beautiful novel about lost youth on a far-flung, forgotten island

Marie, a nurse on the island of Mayotte, adopts an abandoned baby and names him Moise, raising him as a French boy. As he grows up, Moise struggles with his status as an "outsider" and to understand why he was abandoned as a baby. When Marie dies, he is left alone, plunged into uncertainty and turmoil, ending up in the largest and most infamous slum on Mayotte, nicknamed "Gaza".

Narrated by five different characters, Tropic of Violence is an exploration of lost youth on the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. Shining a powerful light on problems of violence, immigration, identity, deprivation and isolation on this island that became a French departement in 2011, it is a remarkable, unsettling new novel that draws on the author's own observations from her time on Mayotte.

Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan