In the middle of Kigali is a swimming pool at the Hôtel des Mille-Collines. It is a magnet for a privileged group of residents, a place where middle-class Rwandans drink with melancholy expatriates and prostitutes. But beyond the walls of the hotel exists a chaotic society in which millions live in poverty, surrounded by violence and disease. In this troubled world, Valcourt, a Canadian journalist, falls for Gentille, a beautiful Hutu waitress.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a poignant love story, a stirring hymn to humanity and a modern classic of spellbinding power, confronting the nightmare that ravaged Rwanda in the 1990s.

Prizes

Short-listed for The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize 2003 (Canada)

Exceptional . . . you must read it * * Sunday Times * *
A Heart of Darkness for today -- YANN MARTEL
Intense and gut-wrenching, poetic and disquieting * * Observer * *
Illuminating and horrifying, compassionate and scathing * * Times Literary Supplement * *
Astounding . . . It's no surprise that this book has won so many prizes * * Daily Mail * *
Courtemanche's time in Rwanda, where he worked as a journalist, may have produced the first great novel of the catastrophe that befell that country * * Guardian * *
Haunting, graceful . . . with a journalist's unblinking eye and an appreciation of bitter irony * * New York Times * *
An intense affair, urgent and nerve-wrackingly ominous, with a surprisingly boisterous humour * * Financial Times * *
Courtemanche's work has an enormous quality . . . Read this book * * Spectator * *
Very powerful . . . I urge you to read it * * Literary Review * *

Gil Courtemanche was born in Montreal in 1943 and died in 2011. A journalist, broadcaster, writer and filmmaker in international and third-world politics, he was the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, and made the award-winning documentary The Gospel of AIDS. Courtemanche won the National Magazine Award for political reporting and was a consultant for the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.

Patricia Claxton is one of Canada's foremost translators, winning her first Governor General's Award for translation in 1987 for La Detresse et L'Enchantement by Gabrielle Roy, and her second in 1999 for Francois Ricard's biography of the same writer.