Funny, spooky and surreal, this shapeshifting novel from the Francophone author explores Congolese politics

Best known to English-language readers for his novels African Psycho, Broken Glass and Black Moses, Alain Mabanckou, a social satirist of breathtaking originality, is a leading name in contemporary Francophone literature. His books, which draw on his Congolese heritage, tend to be exuberantly imagined, a tad absurd, very funny and focused on off-kilter and off-centre perspectives. In his piquant and spunky new offering, Mabanckou tells the story of Liwa Ekimakingaï, who returns from the dead in search of closure. Told in the second person and engagingly translated by Helen Stevenson, the novel opens in a cemetery in the port city of Pointe-Noire, where the 24-year-old has risen from his grave in a seismic flurry, attired in an orange crepe jacket, a fluorescent-green shirt, purple flares and shiny red shoes. (If you are new to Mabanckou, you might be interested to know that he employs a personal stylist, and that his own sartorial preference tends toward the bold and bright.) Liwa is a classic Mabanckou character: orphaned, irresistibly charming but cruelly bereft of luck.

Once risen, Liwa falls asleep and begins “the longest dream of his death”, in which images from his four-day funeral mingle with memories of growing up: being raised by his maternal grandmother in the Trois-Cents neighbourhood; getting into mischief with his friends; turning for guidance to the Pentecostal church, officiated by a man later executed for ritual murder; and landing a job as a commis chef in the kitchen of the French-owned Victory Palace Hotel.