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As a child, Elias Almeida loses both his parents during the Angolan uprising against colonial rule. As an adult and professional revolutionary, he bears witness to mankind at its pitiless worst. Yet he continues to believe in a better world and in the redeeming power of love — even though he cannot be with the woman he loves, who rescued him from thugs one snowy night on the streets of Moscow. Spanning forty years of Africa’s past as a battleground between East and West, this powerful novel explores the heights and depths of human nature as it tells a profoundly affecting story of sacrifice and idealism.
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Reviews
Andreï Makine has exceptional gifts for getting to the heart of true feeling . . . HUMAN LOVE is a haunting, often very tender story written in a kind of meditative fury . . . one of the best novels about Africa in a long time
A powerful meditation on the price of ideology and the nature of love . . . The novel, remorseless in its depiction of man's inhumanity, is poetically alive to the redeeming power of love.
A beautiful, haunting fugue that carries the weight of decades of suffering on a continent that the West prefers to romanticise or ignore . . . [Makine's] reputation as one of the significant novelists of our age is only strengthened by this book.
All his books are wonderful . . . But HUMAN LOVE, full of feeling, wisdom and tenderness amidst horror, is one of his best. If you ever despair of modern literature, read Makine.