Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop

The author won the International Booker award with his first novel, and this was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is that good! Michel Adanson, a dying French botanist, leaves his daughter, Aglaé, a notebook. The notebook is hidden; Aglaé will only find it — and in it, the most important story of her father’s life — if she goes looking for it. To receive her father’s secrets, Aglaé will have to accept his belongings days after his death in 1806. Michel Adanson really existed — he was an 18th-century botanist, as well as a figure of the Siècle des Lumières, the Age of Enlightenment--but the story itself is engaging fiction. In Senegal, a young Adanson hears the tale of Maram Seck, the niece of a village chief — according to her uncle — was abducted three years earlier and sold into the slave trade. Maram eventually escaped to the peninsula of Cap Vert, unbelievably escaping from slavery in America. She has been hiding out there ever since, Adanson is told, and he travels to Cap Vert to learn the whole story, which is relayed here. It is engaging, though-provoking, concise, and well written.