“Look, for people who’re going to be dead soon, we’re not doing too badly.”“The novel of the year” is what La Presse called this extraordinary book, a love story that takes place in the days leading up to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A first work of fiction by one of French Canada’s most admired journalists, Gil Courtemanche, it was first published in Quebec in 2000, spent more than a year on bestseller lists and won the Prix des Libraires, the booksellers’ award for outstanding book of the year. Rights were sold to publishers in over twenty countries in Europe and around the world. This humanist story of an unlikely love affair set against a holocaust has become an internationally acclaimed phenomenon, worthy of comparison with the work of Graham Greene and Albert Camus. The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel, Kigali, in the early 1990s, draws a regular crowd of assorted aid workers, strutting Rwandan officials, Belgian businessmen, French paratroops and Canadian expats. Among them is Bernard Valcourt, a documentary filmmaker from Quebec, on a mission to set up a television station in the capital. Valcourt, who for two decades has earned his living from wars and famines, lingers around the pool drinking warm beer and watching football; but most of all, watching Gentille, a beautiful young waitress, who is a Hutu but often mistaken for a Tutsi because of her family’s strange history. The trouble coming stems from a long conflict, instigated in colonial times by Whites who treated Tutsis as superior to Hutus. The Hutu government is now openly encouraging violence against Tutsis. The physical traits of the Tutsis make them easy prey, but they are not the only ones in danger. Too many people are already dying in Rwanda daily: of AIDS, of malaria, and increasingly at roadblocks at the hands of drunken militia, or pulled from their homes. The hotel staff and prostitutes sense trouble and death drawing closer as they continue providing drinks and meals and sex. The story of this developing catastrophe is revealed through the lives of a handful of Rwandans who befriend Valcourt. They confide in him because he listens, and because his interviews offer them a chance to try to change the way things are by telling the world. Their candour and warmth begin to make his heart glow. He meets people like Méthode, who knows a bloodbath is brewing and would rather die of AIDS in the comfort of a hotel room than by a machete. Threatened, frightened, sick, they don’t want to talk and act like they’re dying. Poor as they are, they want to have some moments of pleasure and celebrate life. As Kigali life continues in its resourcefulness and persistence, Valcourt is falling in love with Rwanda, and with Gentille, who loves him because he sees her as no-one has seen her before. Even as the worst horrors begin, as friends are raped and murdered, he starts to feel a strange peace in this land of a thousand hills, though he repudiates the outside world for its failure to intervene. Because Gentille is thought to be Tutsi, her life is in danger. Still, no-one can believe that the extremists will go too far, that brothers and sisters will kill brothers and sisters, and that 800,000 civilians will be massacred. A hard-hitting chronicle of an overlooked chapter of recent history, told with skill and compassion, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is also a celebration of living in the moment, of the integrity of friendship and the courage of everyday heroes. Harrowing, unsettling, challenging, but beautiful and moving, it is a book that cannot leave the reader untouched; as a Quill & Quire reviewer said, it is “full of real people that demand to be remembered.”From Publishers WeeklyBernard Valcourt is a Canadian journalist in Rwanda planning a film on the local AIDS epidemic when he falls in love with Gentille, a Tutsi who works at his hotel at the time of the Hutu-led genocides. Chronicling the days of the government-sponsored atrocities, Courtemanche's novel is powerful in its ability to remind us how much the myth of race has done to divide and destroy the human species in the past hundred years. At the same time, however, it strains to position itself as a sort of neo-existentialist tome, quoting Camus and echoing The Plague. Valcourt describes himself without irony as "sophisticated... an enlightened humanist," and yet his childish self-pity and bitter refusal to accept life's harsh realities are less the trappings of a great intellectual than the alcoholic he obviously is. From the swimming pool terrace of the H"tel des Mille-Collines in Kigali, he observes the rapidly deteriorating situation, "rather like a buzzard on a branch... waiting for a scrap of life to excite him." His supposedly spiritual love for Gentille is intended to redeem him, but it most often takes the form of a rhapsody over her "perfect" body. The Rwanda painted by Courtemanche (a Canadian journalist himself) is a country bloodied by ignorance, hatred, sexual obsession and lust for power, as terrifying and darkly obscene as anything imaginable. Tragic and deeply touching at turns (and illuminating from an historical perspective), the novel is nevertheless cheapened by Valcourt's muddled sentimentalizing and adolescent grandiloquence. As Einstein said, everything is either meaningless or miraculous. Most often it's romantics who, becoming cynics, embrace the former.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistIn recounting the 1994 massacre of Rwanda's Tutsis by the majority Hutus, Courtemanche fictionalizes the thoughts and actions of real participants, but the horrors he describes were all too real. At the story's center lies the improbable love that blossoms between Canadian journalist Bernard Valcourt and Gentille, a shy Hutu waitress at Kigali's Mille-Collines Hotel. Valcourt and Gentille speak out against the brutal attacks that presage the genocide but make no headway with corrupt police, impotent UN forces, oblivious Western media outlets, and postcolonial Belgians and French who helped sow the seeds of racial superiority in Rwanda and then retreated when they bore deadly fruit. It's a powerful political novel about important world issues, which hardly ensures an audience here. As Valcourt notes, "In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance." That this book would introduce many U.S. readers to events that killed some 800,000 people underscores how fatal our willful ignorance of foreign affairs can be to the world's powerless. Frank SennettCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Views: 56
His patient
was ready. He stood for a moment staring down at her his mind working
out the correct incision. Then the first cut...A body has been
discovered in undergrowth in the grounds of a Birmingham hospital,
wrapped in a clinical waste bag and, even more bizarrely, wearing little
but a garish Disney tie. The scar and stitches evident on the dead man's
groin suggest he may have recently been a patient at the hospital. But
when pathologist Karys Harper is brought in to examine the body she
makes a discovery that is more grotesque still -- the surgery wound
was inflicted after death. Clearly this is no ordinary killer. And he's
about to strike again. Views: 56
Barns, Blood and Rock and Roll is a short story collection where the blood of summer flows throughout the barns and cornfields of Indiana. Learn the terrifying secret of a young boy in 1947. Witness the sick, bloody revenge of a sixteen year old girl unto her stepmother. Read in disgust as two sisters make a wrong turn in a secluded state park. Discover these and many more stories inside! Views: 56
IN THE TRADITION OF THE BATTLETECH SERIES, ASPECT PRESENTS AN ACTION-PACKED ADVENTURE BASED ON THE UNIVERSE OF VOR, THE THRILLING NEW MINIATURE-BASED GAME.NO EXITThe world's two superpowers are at war — when suddenly even nuclear annihilation becomes unimportant. For, without warning, the Earth is ripped from orbit, torn from the entire universe, by an insatiable, planet-destroying cosmic vortex. Now both sides — along with everyone else on the globe — are trapped in the grotesque parody of reality called the Maelstrom.Exploring the concepts and expanding the background of this incredible adventure, this novel takes readers and gamers to the beginning: when armies of the near future face the horrors of the battlefield and gut-wrenching alien terrors they cannot escape as they are drawn... Views: 56
For centuries, the Black Eyed People have been suffering at the hands of a witch’s curse. Unable to overcome their compulsion to kill, no-one is safe. Now, sixteen year old Ariel must break the curse in order to be with the guy she loves. Views: 56
Set on the beautiful island of Islay, The Christmas Secret is a gripping story filled with emotion from Karen Swan, author of Christmas Under the StarsAlex Hyde is the leaders' leader. An executive coach par excellence, she's the person the Great and the Good turn to when the pressure gets too much; she can change the way they think, how they operate, she can turn around the very fortunes of their companies.Her waiting list is months' long, but even she can't turn down the unorthodox but highly lucrative crisis call that comes her way a few weeks before Christmas, regarding the troublesome – and troubled – head of an esteemed whisky company in Scotland: Lochlan Farquhar, CEO of Kentallen Distilleries, is a maverick, an enigma and a renegade, and Alex needs to get inside his head before he brings the company to its knees.It should be business as usual. She can do this in her sleep. Only, when she gets to the remote island of Islay,... Views: 56
She's not who she says she is! Tory Evans is living her sister's life. Christine is dead, murdered by Tory's vengeful ex-husband, and now--for her own survival--Tory has taken on Christine's identity. Her name, her job, her new home in Shelter Valley, Arizona.He's reinventing his life. Ben Sanders is a divorced father who's come to Shelter Valley to resume the education that was interrupted years before. He's intrigued by one of his professors, the woman he knows as Christine Evans. She's smart, she's beautiful--and she's hiding something. She's also off-limits.Despite that, despite the secrecy and the danger, Tory and Ben are drawn to each other. Second chances really do exist. Especially in a place like Shelter Valley... Views: 56
Baby Bear asks his parents for all kinds of hugs--wet hugs, dry hugs, fly up to the sky hugs--in search of the best hug of all. Mile 1 books entice brand-new readers with rhyme, rhythm, and repetition. The type is big, the words are easy, and the art is bright and bold. Views: 56
Erotica/Romance. 51329 words long. Views: 56
