Murmurs from the Hills Paperback by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti

Product Details

• Publisher: Archipelago (2026-11-10)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 136 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781962770736
• Item Weight: 147.42 grams
• Dimensions: 17.17 x 13.44 x 0.89 cm

An incantatory, genre-bending collection of tales from Rwanda’s most celebrated memoirist and novelist

“Scholastique Mukasonga breathes upon a vanished world and brings it to life in all its sparkling multifariousness.” —J. M. Coetzee

For two decades Scholastique Mukasonga has traced the specters of the Rwandan genocide. “That painful History is part of Rwanda,” she writes, but “we mustn’t be hostages to that History.” With Murmurs from the Hills, Mukasonga makes a decisive turn in her work, looking to an ancient Rwanda to map and imagine renewal. Though the stories in Murmurs from the Hills read like oral histories—voices overlapping, interjecting, arabesques of shared knowledge—the collection moves restlessly across form. With a wooden amulet on a woman’s naked hip comes girlhood memories of catechism; with a vision of the river Rukarara comes the diary of a European explorer who sought to colonize a land that eluded him. Stories are woven with Rwandan mythology (real and imagined), reflections on Mukasonga’s previous novels, and the hills and elders inscribing her childhood. Digging into the trunk of her mother’s tales, Mukasonga layers myth and memory like tesserae. Mark Polizzotti’s translation moves with unwavering grace, bending with a patchwork of voices as they murmur their own histories.

About the Author

Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. Archipelago Books has brought out her debut novel Our Lady of the Nile, Cockroaches (chosen by the New York Times as one of the fifty best memoirs of the last fifty years), Igifu, Sister Deborah, and National Book Award-nominated The Barefoot Woman. In 2012 Mukasonga received the Prix Renaudot for Notre-Dame du Nil and in 2021, she won the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom.

TRANSLATOR BIO: 

Mark Polizzotti is the author of thirteen books and has translated more than sixty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Scholastique Mukasonga, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, and André Breton. His translations have won or been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the National Book Award, and the International Booker Prize, among other honors. He lives in New York, where he directs the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.