Jacaranda by Gael Faye Published: 6 August 2026

Milan – the twelve-year-old son of a French father and a Rwandan mother – blames flunking his exams on the emotional trauma of the genocide in his mother’s homeland. It’s a convenient excuse: growing up outside Paris in the 1990s, the violence is an abstraction that only reaches him through distant television broadcasts. That is, until Milan’s mother introduces him to Claude, a young cousin with a bandaged head who has come to France seeking medical treatment.

Thrilled to have a new playmate, Milan treats Claude as a brother until one day, he is sent back to Rwanda as quickly as he came. Four years later, Milan travels for the first time to Rwanda, encountering a beguiling country and family members he never knew existed, and reuniting with Claude. But the trip raises more questions than it answers – about Milan's family history, the war and its aftershocks.

Over the course of many years, Milan returns to Rwanda again and again, compelled to confront the past and imagine a new kind of future.