Endorsements for The Convoy

“This book is a precious thing. A telling of essential truths, an act of generosity and of courage. Out of great tragedy Beata has fashioned a testament of enduring love”
Fergal Keane

“An extraordinarily powerful book, a journey of memory and investigation and discovery; original, humane, and beautifully written”
Philippe Sands

“The Convoy is a literary detective novel which, as Seamus Heaney would say, allows hope and history to rhyme. Told in clear, concise prose, this is a brave story that comes at a perfect time, and allows us to know that nothing ever truly ends”
Colum McCann

“A moving and powerful account of the violence of the genocide in Rwanda and of the aftermath for the survivors. Its descriptions of the terror of the days in hiding are unforgettable”
Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

“The Convoy is a tour de force, giving equal weight to individual and collective experience with unparalleled clarity, dignity, and lightness of touch. But I believe that it does more, and better, than that. The Convoy represents literature at its finest from the first sentence to the last”
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, winner of the Prix Goncourt

“The Convoy is a genocide survivor's determined quest to find out more details about her past. But in Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse's gifted hands, this moving and profound book expands to become a meditation on what it means to remember and what we can still salvage from all those things that remain unknown. The Convoy is a deeply intimate story and a generous, capacious examination of survival and healing. It is an affirmation of love's ability to forge new paths across terrain that hatred and violence once tried to destroy. This is a necessary book for our times”
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize

“A superb act of defiance and an unexpected gift to the world”
Olivette Otele, author of African Europeans: An Untold History

Reviews of The Convoy

“The story of [Umubyeyi Mairesse’s] time in hiding, the narrow escapes from the génocidaires, and then finally her flight to freedom with her mother, hidden under a rug on the back of an aid lorry, is agonising and remarkable; and she writes it with great poise and power in The Convoy, her memoir of those terrible days and their aftermath… But the heart of the book, first published in French in 2024, and beautifully translated into English by Ruth Diver, is her attempt to decipher the details of her own story… Only towards the end of her account do you really understand the meaning of the grainy photograph on the cover of this deeply moving and arresting book. The author has waited three decades to tell her story. It has been worth the wait.”
Alec Russell, The Times ‘Best Books of the Week’, March 2025