From the author of the International Booker Prize-winning At Night All Blood is Black: a movingand immersive adventure story set in eighteenth century Senegal
The Door of No Return, on the island of Goree off the coast of Senegal, is where millions of Africans last touched their home continent's soil, before they were transported to slavery in the Americas. When French naturalist Michel Adanson travels to Senegal in 1749, he hears the story of a woman who passed through the door... but then returned. He begins to search for this fabled woman, and soon his search becomes an obsession that leads him on a desperate journey through a land torn apart by slavery.
Set against the backdrop of the Age of Enlightenment and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Beyond The Door of No Return is a thrillingly subversive story of romance and adventure.
Praise for At Night All Blood is Black:
'So incantatory and visceral I don't think I'll ever forget it' - Ali Smith, Guardian
'More than a century after World War I, a great new African writer [has written] a spare yet extraordinary novel about this bloody stain on human history' - Chigozie Obioma, New York Times Book Review
'An extraordinary novel, full of sadness, rage and beauty' - Sarah Waters
Industry Reviews
'At once melancholy and luminous' - Le Monde
'A sublime odyssey confronting the universal values of the Enlightenment with the Atlantic slave trade' - CNEWS
'Definitively confirms David Diop as a major author on the modern literary landscape' - Telerama
'A humanist meditation anchored in African tradition... A historical epic with a bewitching style... A superb adventure story' - Femina
'Stunningly realized and written in exquisite prose... A love story, an adventure tale, and an unflinching examination of the unexpected ways that colonialism and greed ravaged everyone it touched, European and African' - Maaza Mengiste, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Shadow King
'Masterful storytelling... A mesmerizing tale' - Kirkus, starred review
'A captivating intergenerational epic influenced by Senegalese oral tradition' - Publishers Weekly, starred review
'I read Beyond the Door of No Return with pleasure and admiration. David Diop has opened up a new way of thinking about the eighteenth century and its hideous cruelties' - Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Afterlives
'Reading about another country, another culture, another age has the brain-opening effect that Adanson experienced almost 300 years ago... There's nothing quite like this book out there' - The Times
'Offers a portrait of a world in which beauty and brutality co-exist' - Mail on Sunday
'Gripping... A twisty novel' - Literary Review
'Diop's poetic sensibility marks every sentence of this resonant story [...] a writer of multiple talents; a profound and eloquent poet, a powerful storyteller led by memorable, believable characters, and a passionate advocate for voices less heard and stories less told' - Big Issue
'Further endorsement of fiction's ability for revelation... There is suspense, adversity and tension' - The Irish Times
