Speak Rwanda

Book excerpt: A powerful and profoundly moving novel of the civil war in Rwanda, told by men, women, and children on both sides Speak Rwanda by Julian R. Pierce marks the arrival of one of the most mesmerizing novels of the year. In vivid, sometimes horrifying, balanced, complex, and utterly believable chapters, it traces the linked lives of several characters--Hutu and Tutsi, soldiers and civilians, mothers, politicians, nurses, herdsmen, and orphaned children--as they try to survive one of the most violent and deeply disturbing acts of genocide since the Second World War. Through the course of the novel, some live and some die: by the end, the reader is fully involved in the lives of these people, and begins to see a faint glimmer of hope and the promise of peace.