A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel is a magnet for a discrete group of Kigali residents: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates and prostitutes. Among these patrons is the hotel waitress Gentille, a beautiful Hutu often mistaken for a Tutsi, who has long been admired by Bernard Valcourt, a foreign journalist. As the two slide into a love affair and prepare for their wedding, we see the world around them coming apart.

This landmark novel confronts the nightmare that ravaged Rwanda in April 1994, when the Hutu-led government orchestrated genocide against the Tutsi people. A denunciation of poverty, ignorance, global apathy and media blindness, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali has at its heart a shattering love story, told with profound compassion and consummate control.