Memoirs Of A Porcupine

Praise for Broken Glass: A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence -- Melissa McClements * Financial Times *
Broken Glass is a comic romp that releases Mabanckou's sense of humour. Although its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou's jokes work the whole spectrum of humour -- Tibor Fischer * Guardian *
Deserves the acclaim heaped upon it... a thought-provoking glimpse into a stricken country * Waterstone's Books Quarterly *
Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur... the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator's rhetorical extravagances... With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion -- Peter Carty * Independent *
An incredibly funny novel, often rueful, on the edge of tragedy and imbued with the spirit of the French classics. There's a tremendous spirit, irreverence and humour in this book -- Boyd Tonkin, Chair of the Judges for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010
Mabanckou's narrative gains an uplifting momentum of its own -- Emma Hagestadt * Independent *
Mabanckou's irreverent wit and madcap energy have made him a big name in France... surreal -- Giles Foden * Conde Nast Traveller *
Magical realism meets black comedy in an excellent satire by an inventive and playful writer -- Alastair Mabbott * Herald *
Africa's Samuel Beckett ... Mabanckou's freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat. It weds the oral culture of his mother to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather ... [Memoirs of a Porcupine] draws on oral lore and parables in its sly critique of those who use traditional beliefs as a pretext for violence * The Economist *