Left in my street library, different cover art on my copy. I love Booker prize winners and this book also qualifies for the 666 reading challenge (set in Senegal), so onto Mt TBR it goes.

An extremely quick read for a Booker prize book, I read this in a couple of days.
Such a bleak and shocking story of how war turned young Senegalese soldier Alfa into an inhumane killing machine. Not so much a story of war, but how easily Alfa lost all humanity after his "almost brother" Mademba was mortally wounded and he refused to help him die.

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Picked up at meetup on TBR pile

A powerful, brutal, savage, and emotional story of the violence of war.Alfa and Mademba are two young Senglese soldiers fighting for France against the Germans. The young black soldiers are the first sent over the trenches before the white French soldiers. Alfa is haunted by his friend Mademba’s death and goes on a violent rampage killing German soldiers and taking one of their hands. His French captain does not know how to deal with him, his fellow soldiers think he is a demon. I found this hard to read, and could not really empathise with the main character Alfa.

To be released at Meetup

Picked this up from the table at the Melbourne May Bookcrossing brunch at Sapa Hills in Footscray. I seem to be on a WW1 reading spree at the moment as I have just finished Ben Elton's "The First Casuality"

France had a vast colonial empire at the time of WWI and deployed more than 135,000 African riflemen on the European battlefields, where at least 30,000 were killed. Despite being referred to as tirailleurs senegalais they came from over West Africa including Senegal, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. These soldiers were poorly paid and their veteran pensions were low. They also never got the recognition they deserved in French History.
This story is about two childhood friends who sign up to fight in the war and the death of one of them will be the trigger that pushes the other over the edge.

This is not an easy book to read as the author has described some of the atrocities in great detail,

To be Released at the Uncle Dicky Memorial Little Red Library in McPherson St, Coburg