Beyond the Door of No Return

by David Diop

Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop is a historical novel that opens in France, but is set mainly in 18th-century Senegal, at the height of the slave trade. It’s the story of a French botanist, Michel Adanson, and what befell him after going to the island of Saint-Louis in Senegal. As he writes to his daughter, “Things did not go the way I planned. I made the voyage to Senegal to discover plants, and instead I encountered people.”

Diop won the International Booker Prize in 2021 for his work of historical fiction set in World War I, At Night All Blood Is Black.