A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
by Gil Courtemanche
Translated from the French by Patricia Claxton

• Bibliothèque de Montreal ,Canada
• Edmonton Public Library, Canada
• Bibliothèques Municipales, Geneva Switzerland
  

The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel is a magnet for an eclectic group of Kigali residents: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates and prostitutes. Among them is the hotel waitress Gentille, a beautiful Hutu often mistaken for a Tutsi, who has long been admired by Bernard Valcourt, a Canadian journalist. As the two slide into a love affair, civil unrest in Rwanda makes insidious progress, engulfing the people around the pool in the chaos of civil war.
This novel confronts the nightmare that ravaged Rwanda in April 1994, when the Hutu-led government orchestrated genocide against the Tutsi people. With profound compassion and consummate control, Gil Courtemanche navigates a world about to be wrested apart, where the faces of the aggressors are those of neighbours, friends and family. A solemn denunciation of poverty, ignorance, global apathy and media blindness, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is, above all, a stirring hymn to humanity that will move and challenge all who read it.

Gil Courtemanche is an author and journalist in international and third-world politics. Among his recent non-fiction works are Québec and Nouvelles douces colères. He lives in Québec, Canada, where he works as a political columnist for the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir, and is writing a second novel. A French feature film production of A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is underway.