From the winner of the Grand Prix de la Littérature 2012

Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 The history of Credit Gone West, a squalid Congolese bar, is related by one of its most loyal customers, Broken Glass, who has been commissioned by its owner to set down an account of the characters who frequent it. Broken Glass himself is a disgraced alcoholic school teacher with a love of French language and literature which he has largely failed to communicate to his pupils but which he displays in the pages of his notebook. The notebook is also a farewell to the bar and to his fellow drinkers. After writing the final words, Broken Glass will go down to the River Tchinouka and throw himself into its murky waters, where his lamented mother also drowned. Broken Glass is a Congolese riff on European classics from the most notable Francophone African writer of his generation.

"A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence" - 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" - Guardian

"Deserves the acclaim heaped upon it... self-mocking and ironic, 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" - Independent

"This bar-room yarn-spinner tells his fellow tipplers' tales in a voice that swings between broad farce and aching tragedy. His farewell performance from a perch in "Credit Gone West" abounds in scorching wit and flights of eloquence... vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence." - Independent

"A book of grubby erudition... full of tall tales that can entertain readers from Brazzaville to Bognor." - Guardian

"Selected as one of the 100 best books of the 21st century" - The Guardian