Beyond the Door of No Return is the story of a French Enlightenment botanist who travels to Senegal to study plants and finds himself overwhelmed by love for an African woman. Now Diop has brought his capacious mind to bear on an earlier period of encounter between Europe and Africa. Visceral horror, incantatory language and delicate thinking were welded in its slender form. At Night All Blood Is Black is narrated by a young Senegalese soldier recruited to fight for France in the first world war and brutalised in the trenches. Readers of David Diop’s previous novel, which won the International Booker prize and already feels like a classic of war fiction, probably won’t have forgotten the experience.
