With all the reiteration of the same points in the same words, the reader starts to feel pretty shellshocked too, but just when you’re thinking: “Get on with it”, he does. (In this respect, the original French title Frère d’âme, which translates as something like Soul Brother, seems more fitting than the one we have.) He refuses, then is consumed with guilt, just as he felt guilty for helping Diop get fit for the fighting to begin with. The madness is sparked or accelerated by Ndiaye having to watch his childhood friend Mademba Diop, “my more-than-brother”, die alongside him, disembowelled and begging for Ndiaye to kill him. The others play at being mad.” Soon, he is believed to be a dëmm, a “devourer of souls”, and spurned by his fellow troops.Īs Ndiaye’s identity begins to crack, the brilliance of Diop’s conceit becomes clear It involves the escalation of violence – he has taken to cutting off the hands of dead German troops (“my trench-mates began to fear me after the fourth hand”) – and his descent into madness. He has, “God’s truth”, a horror story to share. It begins in a forceful but repetitive way, hammering over and over the same points in the narrative by Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier in the first world war.

In fact, it’s possible to feel underwhelmed with Diop’s novel at first.

And by the time it won the International Booker prize earlier this month, David Diop’s second novel At Night All Blood Is Black (translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis) had already scooped awards in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the US. W inning a big prize can be bittersweet for a writer: now the majority of people who read your book will have sky-high expectations, higher, indeed, than the judges who gave the award.

Book at night all blood is black