A Waking Dream or Nightmare Daily News (via HT Media Ltd.)
“The book is frightening – reading it, you feel you are being hypnotised,” says Hughes-Hallett, Chair of judges, at the Booker International Prize 2021. “Your emotions are all jangled up, your mind is being opened to new thoughts. It is an extraordinary piece of narrative, very powerful, very compelling. The protagonist is accused of sorcery and all of us, we judges, did feel this book had somehow put a spell on us. It is that hypnotically compelling.”
Explaining further in an interview with the BBC, Hughes-Hallett added, David Diop’s “At Night All Blood Is Black” is “a story about war, but also about love, the comradeship of those young men who fight together and the extraordinarily intense relationships that are formed by people who are risking death alongside each other. It is also a story about language – the protagonist does not speak much French, so it is a story written in French