The Other Mornings

Carried out of Rwanda at six years old, her shoes still in her uncle's coat pocket, Jeannette has spent thirty years in Brussels becoming someone composed, expensive, and impossible to reach. She is engaged to Émile-a good man who wants to marry her on the ground where her family died, and turn her grief into something that means. In the weeks before the wedding, she does the one thing that takes it all apart. What follows is not a story of healing. It is a quieter, harder thing. A woman goes back to a country she cannot remember and raises a daughter on the hill where her mother is a name read aloud once a year. She learns to dig the same ditch every April beside the people who survived it and the people who did it. And she is handed an inheritance she can never verify: a father who was either a hero or only a man who happened to fall the right way, and an old man's confession that he invented the kinder version because he could not carry the other. The Other Mornings is a spare, unflinching novella about memory, reconciliation, and the oldest temptation there is: to hand the people we love a meaning, and call it a fact. Cornelis van Houte

Pagina's: 121, Paperback, Independently published