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This Strange Eventful History: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
Claire Messud
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LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
'An epic family odyssey' Guardian, Book of the Day
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the Cassar family is buffeted by conflict, struggling to find its feet - separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all.
This Strange Eventful History is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of Fran ois and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of Fran ois's union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.
Inspired in part by her own family's history, Claire Messud animates her characters' rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. This Strange Eventful History is an immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history.
'[A] wise and insightful novel about identity and family' The Times, Book of the Day
'A rich, sprawling saga... This Strange Eventful History may be Messud's finest book' Sunday Telegraph
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Praise for This Strange Eventful History: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
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This epic family saga, which stretches from Algeria in 1927 to Connecticut in 2010 . . . [is a] wise and insightful novel about identity and family, and how love can stifle as well as comfort - The Times, Book of the DayA rich, sprawling saga . . . This Strange Eventful History may be Messud's finest book - Sunday TelegraphA tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters... Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us - Yiyun Li
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