Beyond The Door of No Return

The Door of No Return, on the island of Goree off the coast of Senegal, is where millions of Africans last touched their home continent's soil, before they were transported to slavery in the Americas. When French naturalist Michel Adanson travels to Senegal in 1749, he hears the story of a woman who passed through the door... but then returned. He begins to search for this fabled woman, and soon his search becomes an obsession that leads him on a desperate journey through a land torn apart by slavery.

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Enlightenment and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Beyond The Door of No Return is a thrillingly subversive story of romance and adventure.

'At once melancholy and luminous' - Le Monde

'A sublime odyssey confronting the universal values of the Enlightenment with the Atlantic slave trade' - CNEWS

'Definitively confirms David Diop as a major author on the modern literary landscape' - Telerama

'A humanist meditation anchored in African tradition... A historical epic with a bewitching style... A superb adventure story' - Femina

'Stunningly realized and written in exquisite prose... A love story, an adventure tale, and an unflinching examination of the unexpected ways that colonialism and greed ravaged everyone it touched, European and African' -Maaza Mengiste, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Shadow King


'Masterful storytelling... A mesmerizing tale' -Kirkus, starred review


'A captivating intergenerational epic influenced by Senegalese oral tradition' -Publishers Weekly, starred review


'I read Beyond the Door of No Return with pleasure and admiration. David Diop has opened up a new way of thinking about the eighteenth century and its hideous cruelties' -Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Afterlives

David Diop was born in Paris in 1966 and grew up in Senegal. He now lives in France, where he is a professor of eighteenth century literature at the University of Pau. David's second novel, At Night All Blood is Black, has been translated into more than 30 languages, winning the International Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Prize, as well as major prizes in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzlerland and was chosen by Barack Obama as one of his summer reads. The Door of No Return was longlisted for the Goncourt Prize in France.

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