Tomorrow I will be twenty years old

Pointe-Noire, late 1970s. Michel, a boy of about ten, is learning about life, friendship and love, in the apparent chaos of a Congo under Marxist government. The episodes of a colorful family chronicle follow one another, with its burlesque situations and colorful characters: Michel's adoptive father, a receptionist at the Victory Palace hotel; mother Pauline, who sometimes has trouble educating her turbulent only son; uncle René, rich and nevertheless conveniently communist; friend Lounès, whose sister Caroline causes Michel to experience a furious turmoil of hormones...

Alain Mabanckou offers us a Life Ahead African style. He lends his narrator a delightful language whose false naivety works wonders.

"Let's bet that little Michel will permanently join, in our romantic memory, the Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye , by J. D. Salinger, or the unforgettable Thousand Miles of Nose that Speaks , by Réjean Ducharme. » J. M. G. Le Clézio