Ananda Devi, Mauritius
and a lost kingdom

A major figure in the French-speaking literary world, Mauritian author Ananda Devi returns to her native island to compose a fabulous epic where history, memory and the marvellous are woven together.

It is undoubtedly her most ambitious novel. It all begins in Bouchon, an isolated village on the island of Mauritius, where four generations have followed one another since the days of slavery. At the heart of this community are five children banished from a sugar plantation—three raised as White children by the owner and his wife and who, through a kind of trick of fate, were taken for their legitimate children for more than twenty years; and two born to a Black enslaved woman. In reality, all five are said to be descendants of the same man, the mysterious Vieux Bouc, a former African slave who appears to possess an irresistible magnetism. Driven out by the White plantation owner, Monsieur Dumontais, who eventually realises his mistake, the five siblings seek refuge in the far southeast of the island, where they establish a kingdom governed by its own laws, cut off from the outside world and sheltered by a forest and a bay. A kind of lost paradise. In this world contained within a tiny village, where the dead speak to the living, where a woman is reborn as a plant deity and a child becomes the confessor of humankind, while another lives among the birds, realism blends with magic and myth.True to her distinctive style, Ananda Devi, a leading voice in Mauritian literature and the daughter of parents of Indian descent, brings the violence of colonial history into dialogue with a rich and exuberant imagination. 

The supernatural is never merely decorative: it offers another way of expressing the wounds of memory, the transmission of trauma and the strength of family ties. Winner in 2006 of the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, which honours a novel written in French from anywhere in the French-speaking world, and the RFO Prize, awarded by France’s overseas broadcaster, for Eve Out of Her Ruins (Gallimard), this author, whose work has received numerous awards and been translated into a dozen languages, continues to explore the themes that have long preoccupied her: domination, métissage, desire, cruelty, but also the resistance of the forgotten. The village of Bouchon becomes a miniature of humanity, where individual passions converge with the upheavals of the world. A place of resistance, but also of resurrection. Because even in the darkest of times, rebirth is always possible.