Allen & Unwin Black Moses book Fiction English Paperback 208 pages

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017: the larger-than-life, laugh-out-loud story of an African Oliver Twist.

It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But over at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of terror of Dieudonne Ngoulmoumako, the institution's corrupt director.

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. An award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in LA, where he teaches literature at UCLA. His four previous novels African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar and Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty - a fictionalised retelling of Mabanckou's childhood in Congo - are all published by Serpent's Tail, as is the memoir The Lights of Pointe-Noire, which won the 2016 French Voices Award. In 2015 Mabanckou was listed as a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.