TY  - BOOK
AU  - Diop,David
AU  - Taylor,Sam
TI  - Beyond the door of no return
SN  - 9780374606770
PY  - 2023///
CY  - New York
PB  - Farrar, Straus and Giroux
KW  - Adanson, Michel,
KW  - Botanists
KW  - Fiction
KW  - Enslaved women
KW  - Slavery
KW  - Senegal
KW  - France
KW  - Colonies
KW  - Africa
KW  - Historical fiction
KW  - lcgft
KW  - Biographical fiction
KW  - Novels
N2  - "A historical novel about a French botanist's search for a mysterious woman who escaped from slavery in Senegal"--; Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman's Maram. The key to this mysterious woman's identity is Adanson's unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée, a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade,  to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart
ER  -