WINNER OF THE 2015 PEN TRANSLATES
WINNER OF THE 2015 ETISALAT PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
A pulsating novel of urban abandonment in the Congo.
In an unnamed African city in secession, profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities mix. They have only one desire: to make a fortune by exploiting the mineral wealth of the land. Two friends - Lucien, a writer with literary ambitions, home from abroad, and his childhood friend Requiem, who dreams of taking over the seedy underworld of their hometown - gather in the most notorious nightclub in town: the Tram 83. Around them gravitate gangsters and young girls, soldiers and stowaways, profit-seeking tourists and federal agents of a nonexistent State.
Tram 83 plunges the reader into a modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colourfully exotic. A daring feat of narrative imagination and linguistic creativity, Tram 83 uses the rhythms of jazz to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village.
PRAISE FOR FISTON MWANZA MUJILA
'One of the most exciting discoveries of the rentrée ... There is some Hieronymus Bosch in this frenetic, flamboyant, closed-door city slicker. An insolent, globe-trotting Hieronymus Bosch, one who would have read Gabriel García Márquez and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.' Le Monde
'This ambitious fugue from Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila delves into an African nation riven by civil war, disease, poverty, and endemic corruption ... It's bustling, strange experimental fiction in which the chaos of daily life leaks like blood from the iron fist of violence and profit.' The Sydney Morning Herald
