David Wright Faladé’s new novel “The New Internationals” draws from his own ancestral history. Paris is free of the Nazis but afflicted with poverty, privation and postwar politics. The French are on the lookout for collaborators and young Cecile’s family is traumatized by the losses they’ve endured.
They will respond to that trauma in very different ways.
As the war years fade, Cecile matures, taking a low-level job at the Louvre, flirting with young communists and falling in love with a student who has been sent from Africa to learn architecture and to bring his skills back to his home country.
And here’s where Faladé’s biography intersects with his art. Faladé’s mother, the daughter of French-Jewish citizens who survived the Nazi occupation, told him for the first 16 years of his life that he was descended from Africans who lived in the kingdom of Dahomey.
— Kerri Miller, MPR News
Mystery character of the month answer: Catwoman
