Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo transmits the authoritarian abuses of Ahmed Sékou Touré in this novel of a female survivor, the eponymous Véronique, living in exile. Her initial entreaty to Madame Corre, that she write her own story, soon gives way to a contextualization of Guinean atrocities in the broader context of a century of devastation and the attempts writers have made to chronicle that destruction. One meditation from this excerpt particularly sticks with me, a notion building from Kundera's line that “Memory doesn't film, it photographs.” The narrator explains that all days contain all others, and fixing on the photographs mistakes the process of history for a dismal moment.