Professor Martin Munro (French and Francophone Studies) publishes new translation of Michael Ferrier’s novel Scrabble: A Chadian Childhood.

In 1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of N’Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michaël Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family, and memory.

Michaël Ferrier is a Franco-Mauritian writer, novelist and essayist, living in Tokyo.