Beyond the Door of No Return

April 1, 2023

Author of the scorching At Night All Blood Is Black, an International Booker Prize winner and LJ Best Book, Diop's latest chronicles celebrated 1700s botanist Michel Adanson's search for the mysterious Maram, a noblewoman from the African kingdom of Waalo who was sold into enslavement but escaped to a remote village. His journey through Senegal, where Diop was raised, limns the atrocities of French colonialism and the depths of human passion. With a 25,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 19, 2023
Diop (At Night All Blood Is Black) returns with a captivating intergenerational epic influenced by Senegalese oral tradition. It begins in 1806 Paris, where botanist Michel Adanson dies, leaving his adult daughter, Aglaé, with fervent questions about who her father really was. Among his many belongings, she finds a manuscript intended for her, recounting the years Adanson spent in Senegal in his early 20s, researching flora and fauna. There, he hears a story from village chief Baba Seck about Maram, the chief’s adopted daughter who was kidnapped, sold into slavery, escaped, and returned to a nearby village. Adanson and his guide and friend Ndiek become obsessed with finding Maram, which sets them on an overland journey through the Senegalese bush. Told as a series of fast-paced stories within stories, the novel contemplates race, hierarchy, religion, legends, and possible futures for its characters and society at large. At the same time as he considers the big picture, though, Diop writes excellently of historical and regional minutiae, as in his descriptions of the sheer heat and exhaustion his characters face on their travels. This is a novel to devour quickly, but which will leave readers contemplating its story long after. Agent: Magalie Delobelle, So Far So Good Agency.

Starred review from July 15, 2023
In French colonial Senegal, a young, soon-to-be-eminent French botanist becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman sold into slavery who escaped to freedom. Michel Adanson journeyed to Senegal to catalog new fauna and flora for "Universal Orb," his magnum opus. A half-century later, following his death in 1806, his daughter, Agla�, discovers his hidden notebooks, which document his intense experiences on and around the island of Gor�e. Life will never be the same for him after he learns of Maram Seck, known as "the revenant," who is said to have miraculously "returned alive from beyond the seas, from that land where, for slaves, there is no return" and disappeared on Senegal's Cap-Vert. Consumed by Maram's story, Adanson and his guide endure harsh conditions to find her, and when they do, they learn that her painful tale is very different from the face-saving version told by her uncle Baba Seck, a village chief. When she was 16, he sold her to a white man for a musket after she bashed him unconscious during an attempted rape. Overwhelmed by her natural beauty, spiritual strength, and beguiling use of the nontonal Wolof language, Adanson falls helplessly in love with her. But fearful that he will never be worthy of her love, he ultimately exposes the traits that make that so. Less brutal than Diop's International Booker Prize-winning At Night All Blood is Black (2020) but no less powerful, the new book takes its title from the familiar name for the place on "the island of slaves" where millions of Africans were shipped to the Americas. With its sumptuous physical descriptions, shades of language, and smooth overlap of truth and invention, this is masterful storytelling. The ease with which the narratives (including Agla�'s) unfold belies the emotional force they gather. A mesmerizing tale.

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Starred review from September 1, 2023
"I made that voyage to Senegal to discover plants, and instead I encountered people," Michel Adanson, a famous French botanist, wrote in a memoir found after his death in 1806. Set in the mid-eighteenth century, this unfinished work chronicles Adanson's na�vet�. When he first lands in Senegal, he learns of Maram, a woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo who was sold into slavery but had allegedly returned, seemingly as a revenant, and settled in Cap-Vert. Determined to learn more, Adanson travels across Senegal to meet her. As a result, he discovers the truth behind her legend and falls in blushing love with Maram's searing beauty. Diop (At Night All Blood Is Black, 2020) delivers a complexly layered story that challenges the preconceived notions his imagined memoirist brings to the table as a white man even as he tries to rise above the strictures of race. If at times the story ties itself up in too many knots of social commentary, the novel still proves that romance crosses all boundaries and remains as timeless as ever.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 22, 2023

A deceased parent bequeaths a jumble of books and antique furniture to a daughter, who discovers his journals in a secret drawer. While this could be a tired trope, in the hands of Diop (At Night All Blood Is Black), botanist Michel Adanson's revelatory musings are a joy to read. He confesses that his single-minded pursuit of a scientific legacy, to the detriment of his wife and their daughter Agla�, seems inconsequential at the end of life. Adanson wants Agla� to know the heart of the 23-year-old scientist who left Paris for Senegal in the mid-1700s, searching for plants but discovering and embracing the culture, a vibrant language, and a people who honor their dead with stories rather than monuments. His youthful imagination, sparked by the legend of Maram, the only woman to have returned from the Americas after being sold into enslavement, takes Adanson on a fateful quest likened to that of Orpheus for his Eurydice. Diop explores the nature of love, passion, prejudice, and memory through Adanson's all-encompassing obsession with Maram. VERDICT This affecting historical novel, enhanced with traces of magical realism, raises thoughtful questions for discussion groups, reminiscent of Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing.--Sally Bissell

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.