The Convoy (hardback)
by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse
 
Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s harrowing, urgent memoir documents and reconstructs her escape, at the age of fifteen, from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
 
“A moving and powerful account of the violence of the genocide in Rwanda and of the aftermath for the survivors. Its descriptions of the terror of the days in hiding are unforgettable”
Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
 
“This book is a precious thing. A telling of essential truths, an act of generosity and of courage. Out of great tragedy Beata has fashioned a testament of enduring love”
Fergal Keane
 
“A superb act of defiance and an unexpected gift to the world. It reclaims the right to individualise the genocide against the Tutsi and offers a powerful alternative to resilience stories”
Olivette Otele, author of African Europeans: An Untold History 
 
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The author was fifteen at the height of the genocide inflicted on the Tutsi people in Rwanda. She and her mother had spent weeks moving from one insecure shelter to another amid scenes of petrifying violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a period of only three months.
 
The lives of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother were a sleepless nightmare – until, eventually, a place was eventually found for them on a convoy to safety. 
 
More than a decade later, after rebuilding her life in France, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was ready to begin the process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape and
establishing community with other survivors. She is now a poet and a prize-winning novelist, but until now she never written about her own history. 
 
Beginning by making contact with the BBC team which filmed the convoy, then by tracking down aid workers, journalists and fellow escapees and scouring archives in a search for photographs of her crossing of the border, the author pieces together records and personal accounts to try to comprehend the chaos that overtook Rwanda at the time of the genocide.
 
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**Winner of the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro, the Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté, the Prix France Télévisions and the Prix du Roman Métis des Lecteurs. Finalist for the Prix du Livre Inter**
 
“An extraordinarily powerful book, a journey of memory and investigation and discovery; original, humane, and beautifully written”
Philippe Sands