I’m not too sure what to say about this one. A semi-autobiographical look at a young boy’s joyful childhood growing up in Burundi, and its rapid descent into horror as war and genocide tear his world apart.

I loved the depictions of his childhood friendships and some of the writing is quite beautiful, never laboured, and evocative. And then devastating. And it leaves you with so many questions.

This is from my backlog when I first joined #Netgalley, with thanks to Hogarth for the ARC and apologies for the horribly late review.

A beautifully written and incredibly moving coming of age tale set against the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide. Viewed through the eyes of a 10 year old boy, Gaby, who lives in Burundi with his French father, Rwandan mother, and his sister Ana, this starts with normal life for Gaby - school, hanging out with his friends, writing to his pen friend... no real worries beyond the odd older bully, no real cares in the world.
Then life slowly starts to change. Adults whispering late at night, the sound of distant gun fire, tribalism, division and a growing sense of danger and impending doom. A trip to a cousin's wedding starts to amp up the feeling of unease, and then things start to accelerate rapidly spiraling out of control.
Partially based on Faye's own childhood, this is a hugely compelling read, as the Rwandan genocide brings a harsh and abrupt end to the innocence of childhood in the most unimaginable ways. There is no need for exaggerated narratives or over the top scenarios - truly terrible things that defy belief happened in our living memory. Faye doesn't dwell on them but they provide a shocking backdrop to this incredible piece of writing. I can't recommend this book strongly enough.

A beautifully written, heart rendering story of childhood innocence and the loss of that in a war torn country. Gaby I lives in Burundi - his father is French and his mother is a Rwandan Hutu. The story follows Gaby as a young boy in the time of the horrific ethnic cleansing of Rwanda and Burundi. Highly recommended

"War always takes it upon itself, unsolicited, to find us an enemy. I wanted to remain neutral, but I couldn’t. I was born with this story. It ran in my blood. I belonged to it."

I can’t believe it took me so long to pick this book up. The prologue alone gripped me instantly!

Small Country tells the story of young Gabriel, the son of a Rwandan mother and a French father, who lives in Burundi on the brink of war, loss and tragedy. While this book offers an insight to the mid-nineties sociopolitical situation leading up to the Rwandan genocide, it also highlights how different backgrounds and belief system can cause a rift between family and friends, because it’s not just war that tears peoples apart; it’s also the fear of imminent war that makes people choose a side and become a part of the war that they never wanted to fight in the first place.

There are books, particularly in the literary fiction genre, that have won me over because the characters and situations they depicted were very relatable and, thus, plausible. This was not such a case. Small Country refers to a reality and a series of events I have never been exposed to and I was so thankful for that virtual slap in the face. More than that, this book elicited all kinds of emotions as I was reading it- laughter and tears, sadness and joy, nostalgia and hope.

I would say that the story doesn’t quite flow as a novel, but has the feel of a memoir to it, giving us little pieces of information about the protagonist’s childhood life in Africa. It didn’t feel like a translated book, which is always a pleasant surprise, because sometimes I have the fear that the translation won’t do justice to the original text. Once I heard someone say that literature transcends language barriers when given a proper chance; couldn’t have said it better myself. I only knocked off a star because sometimes I felt myself growing detached from the story.

Gabriel, or Gaby, is a half-French, half-Rwandan boy living in Burundi. His mother fled Rwanda in the last Rwandan war. She is Tutsi. The tribal, ethnical, and national divisions seem distant from Gaby at the beginning of the novel, but as Small Country develops, the young boy is forced to take sides. From the safety of his street he is forced into the bloodshed.

I thought I would love this story. I felt moved by its outlines, ensnared by its promises of what might unfold, of the awkward dissonance of belonging and difference. In many ways I did get what I was expecting. I was taken into Burundi. I could dip my toes into Lake Tanganyika. I was made to understand what it might feel like to hide on cold tile corridors, bolstered by multiple concrete walls far from windows. And yet…

In Chapter 23, Gaby writes about his friend who wins an argument by expressing his grief. He says, ‘Suffering is a wildcard in the game of debate, it wipes the floor with all other arguments’. In a sense any lack of appreciation I feel towards the book sits on this difficult boundary especially as there was so much to admire in Small Country. I particularly enjoyed the ending. It leaves a challenging, bitter taste in the mouth, questioning foreign interaction and interference in Africa, making Gaby’s mother a symbol of what is left after the fighting is done. And yet I still feel somehow at the same distance from events as Gaby appears to be, despite what he was forced to do. 

I’m sure many will enjoy Small Country - it has beauty, poise and shows just how oddly politics can transmute into children's lives - but I didn’t fall in love with it.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Hogarth Press, and the author Gael Faye.
I read this book in under 24 hours and it was heartbreakingly moving. My only complaint is that I felt it could have gone on for much longer, and was sad that it was a short novel covering such a serious subject.
The story covers one (of many) episodes of Rwandan genocide, the impact it has on neighbouring Burundi, and the loss of innocence of Gabriel, our narrator. This is the third book I have read this year covering this subject, and I continue to be fascinated by this troubled country and its history.
A difficult book to read at times, but nonetheless incredibly impactful and touching. I would highly recommend it.
4 stars.

A brief but powerful read, exploring the effects of war and violence on a young boy's childhood. The focus is on Gaby and his world rather than the remote adult world of politics, war and genocide. The events are filtered through Gaby's eyes, his innocence and ignorance becoming more poignant. His desire to push the terror and horror away and retreat into his safe world with his group of friends and their carefree pursuits is authentic and touching. The writing, it has to be said, is very good indeed. It has that rare quality of being unobtrusive in the story and is all the more effective for being so. Gaby's love for his childhood and his desperation to preserve it and insulate himself from the horrors he instinctively knows await him in the adult world are palpable and affecting.
As highly enjoyable as the rest of the book is the ending is incredible. The last 5% of the book is like a hammer blow - genuinely painful and heart breaking. The experience of the mother and the pivotal moment in Gaby's life are all the more powerful and emotional for the contrast to their previous lives, especially Gaby's sheltered and privileged childhood.
And then it ends on a note of such perfectly muted hope. Very good indeed.

This is a superb read and definitely deserves the accolades I have read - and I can certainly see why it is being translated into many languages. This Burundi-set story sees mixed-race Gaby, his sister Ana and their peers growing up in the early 1990s, just at the start of neighbouring Rwanda’s horrific genocide.

Faye’s novel deals with childhood idylls, of playing with friends, enjoying a safe world, albeit one that is fairly privileged, at least initially. Gaby and his friends are mainly from expat families and live in a leafy suburb of a city in Burundi. However, the book deals with so much more - the impact of a terrible genocide, the way this is senseless and how it affects so many people’s lives, so much so that things change drastically.

I loved the clarity of Faye’s narrative; the beauty of his story-telling, firmly rooted in real-life events, and look forward to his next novel.

In this emotionally charged book, Gaël Faye carefully navigates through a modern time where human depravity almost touches the bottom of the abyss. Unfortunately, it seems our nature and society will always throw up cases of cruelty but when a systematic national directive incites genocide, can we continue to describe this as human? In 1994 the racial tensions between Hutu and Tutsi made global news for the brutal massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda and to a lesser extent in Burundi.

“The war between Tutsis and Hutus … is it because they don’t have the same land?”
“No, they have the same country.”
“So … they don’t have the same language?”
“No, they speak the same language.”
“So … they don’t have the same God?”
“No, they have the same God.”
“So … why are they at war?”
“Because they don’t have the same nose.”

Ten-year-old Gaby (Gabriel) lives with his French father, Rwandan mother (soon to be separated) and sister Ana, in Bujumbura, in Burundi, which borders Rwanda. In the 1900s Gaby and his 4 other friends, Gino, Armand, and the twins, spend time doing what all friends do, they pick mangoes (not always honestly) and sell to make money, and use an old VW Combi as their HQ. They start to get that uneasy feeling when adults get worried and start speaking in whispers when attitudes change and anxiety creeps into everyday life. How long can they be shielded from the fear, brutality and atrocities that are escalating in Burundi and neighbouring Rwanda?

NOT FOREVER – [pause, silence, tears]

“This poisonous lava, the thick flow of blood, was ready to rise to the surface once more. We didn’t know it yet but the hour of the inferno had come, and the night was about to unleash its crackle of hyenas and wild dogs.” Innocence is lost!

Gaël Faye has written a really heartfelt, moving and inspiring book dealing with the loss of innocence and dreams when humanity descends to unimaginable depths of depravity. The effects on family, especially those that have witnessed or narrowly escaped the killings, is compassionately narrated in the story. This is an absolutely excellent debut, wonderfully well written and deserves to be read, lest we forget. When asked of Hutu militia why do you kill with machetes when you have guns, the answer was, bullets cost them [victims] money and they are poor.

Many thanks to Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and NetGalley, for an ARC version of the book in return for an honest review.

The small country in question is Burundi, the lesser known twin to Rwanda. Like Rwanda, Burundi has ethnic tension between the Hutu and Tutsi population; unlike Rwanda the tensions have been kept on a slow boil rather than spilling over into mass genocide.

The novel is narrated by Gaby (Gabriel), a Burundian man now living in Europe, looking back on his childhood in Burundi. He is terribly homesick. He remembers a happy childhood, living in a middle class neighbourhood of Bujumbura, the Capital, with his French father and Rwandan mother. His friends are also mostly mixed race and middle class, identifying as African but not always accepted by the majority Burundians. Gaby's family had servants - some Hutu and some Tutsi - and travelled to see family in Rwanda. He scrumped mangoes from his neighbour's trees and sold them back to her.

In school, Gaby was successful, intelligent to the point of precociousness, politically astute. This is thrown into relief in the letters between himself and Laure, a French pen-friend allocated to him by his school. Laure has little interest in the world and seems to imagine Gaby sits on the ground with flies on his face, waiting for the next aid package to fall from the sky. In return for brief letters listing her possessions, Gaby send considered thoughts on the emergent democratic process in Burundi.

Which makes it quite jarring that this supposedly intelligent (and now adult) man narrates the story in simple language and staccato sentences. The voice is far cruder than the language of the transcribed letters he was writing at the age of ten. And while we are on the subject, his narration has a viewpoint problem; even as an adult narrating the story, he tells it as though he still had a child's awareness of the people around him and their actions; a child's unawareness of hidden agenda.

For the first half of the book, it was an interesting exercise in telling us that Africa is a good place and that our pre-conceptions of life in grinding poverty are wide of the mark. But in the second half, the action shifts to Rwanda and the genocide. This is still written in simple language but the imagery is clear, the emotions raw. It doesn't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed current affairs; indeed, it is played in a way that the reader feels a growing sense of horror as Gaby and his family misread the signs and underestimate the enormity of what is coming. The novel puts faces on the atrocity.

This second half of the novel redeems a really ordinary first half, but the overall point of view difficulties still remain problematic. The shift at the end back to adult Gaby feels awkward and weakens the overall impact. I know it is supposed to make us think about the plight of the refugee and consider that refugees often wish they could have stayed at home; they do not feel like lottery winners who have landed up in rich countries. But this is not the strong note on which to leave a novel that has been in the abyss of genocidal Kigali.

Worth reading - and it is a short novel - but a better editor might have turned this into something special.

I‘ve seldom read a book that touched and moved me as much as Small Country. Told from the perspective of a young boy, it brings to life a bit of African history which is so terrible it once mad international front page news but now seems quite forgotten: the genocide of the Tutsi in Burundi and Rwanda. Small Country talks of broken dreams, a stolen childhood, masses of innocents lives taken in the most brutal ways and a hatred which is profound and extremely hard to understand.
This book is one of the best debut novels I‘ve read in years. The language is beautiful with exactly the right words. The letters Gaby writes to his French penpal and to his dead cousin are both the saddest and most perfect ones imaginable.
At the beginning of the book Gaby asks his father what distinguishes Tutsi and Hutu but his father can‘t really tell him. Gaby doesn‘t really understand the difference and neither did I. I would have liked to learn a bit more about the two ethnic groups and wish the author had explained it in a few sentences. This would have made unerstanding some of the political developments and motivations easier.

A heartbreaking story of a young boy and his French-Rwandan family caught up in the Rwanadan genocide of 1993 and the war in Burundi.

Faye’s own childhood experience (half-French, half-Rwandan) mirrors that of his narrator allowing him to construct a wonderful evocation of life in Burundi. The happy days are brought to full, colourful life with common childhood experiences of friendship, family and the dramas of more usual adult conflicts. But beneath it all are the hints of the coming tragedy, always subtle and seemingly trivial as they must have seemed to a child with no real reason to expect the terrible events to come. The complexity of his identity is the crux of the story but Gaby’s accepts it with the enviable ease of a child but they are delicately explored through his interactions with others; the old-fashioned colonial friend of his French father, his mother, a Rwandan Tutsi, who feels herself a stranger in Burundi, relatives and his own friends, most of whom are of mixed parentage.

When Gaby’s family in Rwanda is caught up in the growing violence and the repercussions spread into conflict and war in Burundi Faye’s prose retains its lyrical simplicity and is utterly heart-breaking. He manages that difficult task of convincingly relaying the horror of violence through a child’s eyes, neither losing his character’s voice nor avoiding the terrible reality of the events he describes and so manages to reveal the absurdity of adult violence in all its horrible glory.

The framing device of the present-day narrative cast fresh light onto the events and the repercussions of living through such suffering, particularly in a world that was not touched by it, the problems of settling and integrating and coming to terms with a past so alien to those around you. The yearning for home even when home has served you so poorly. This aspect of the story could perhaps have been utilised a little more, it would have been good to see the adult Gabriel break in more often to question the thoughts and experiences of his younger self and to know more how he understands everything that happened with the experience of an adult for a (slightly) more powerful contrast.