1 1

Archipelago Books

Murmurs from the Hills

Murmurs from the Hills

Rwandan Tales

by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti

$20.00
$20.00
African Literature Available as E-Book French Literature International Literature
Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when this book and other new titles are available for purchase:

For two decades Scholastique Mukasonga has traced the specters of the Rwandan genocide. “That painful History is part of Rwanda,” she writes, but “we mustn’t be hostages to that History.” With Murmurs from the Hills, Mukasonga makes a decisive turn in her work, looking to an ancient Rwanda to map and imagine renewal. Though the stories in Murmurs from the Hills read like oral histories—voices overlapping, interjecting, arabesques of shared knowledge—the collection moves restlessly across form. With a wooden amulet on a woman’s naked hip comes girlhood memories of catechism; with a vision of the river Rukarara comes the diary of a European explorer who sought colonize a land that eluded him. Stories are woven with Rwandan mythology (real and imagined), reflections on Mukasonga’s previous novels, and the hills and elders inscribing her childhood. Digging into the trunk of her mother’s tales, Mukasonga layers myth and memory like tesserae. Mark Polizzotti’s translation moves with unwavering grace, bending with a patchwork of voices as they murmur their own histories.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770736
Pages: 136
Publication Date:

Praise

As she always has, Mukasonga writes clearly and affectingly of difficult history, deftly inserting—without didactic pronouncements—references to German colonialism, Belgian domination, forced Christian catechism, racial segregation, and fatal bloodshed. Remarkable, too, is her seamless ability to integrate gentle levity and surprising humor. Expressive, startling, poignant, Mukasonga's stories capture a Rwanda long vanished, superbly recorded to enjoy in perpetuity.
—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

Distinctive and revelatory . . . the thoughtful storytelling preserves cultural memory while cultivating a deeper understanding of Rwandans’ history, traditions, and enduring resilience. A moving short story collection, Murmurs from the Hills explores the torments and hopes of a nation’s people.
—Defne Tekin, Foreword Reviews

[Murmurs From the Hills'] overlapping voices and collective knowledge reinvigorate the past . . . Mukasonga’s work is known for its unflinching engagement with the 1994 Tutsi genocide . . . Murmurs from the Hills builds on this work by looking back into the pre-colonial past to imagine a future.
—Rhi Harper, Dazed Magazine

Murmurs from the Hills . . . adds another chapter to one of the most vital ongoing translation projects in contemporary letters, one that continues to insist, in Mukasonga’s own words, that Rwanda’s painful history need not hold its people hostage
—Blessing Uwisike, Brittle Paper

Magnificent . . . Mukasonga compresses an epic of the king’s resistance and the grandfather’s dangerous devotion to him, all while crafting in the grandfather’s voice a poignant elegy for a cursed nation (“I fear that the rituals will be neglected, and then our Rwanda will crumble and perhaps the whole world will crumble”). Each of these stories is a treasure.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Murmurs from the Hills sings—of memory, of folklore, of personal and larger histories. At once intimate and expansive, this gorgeous and evocative collection casts a spell through which Rwanda’s past echoes.
—NoViolet Bulawayo

The stories in Murmurs from the Hills reach deep into pre-colonial Rwandan history. How can distant times inform a nation and a people? Through connections to stories told over centuries, both real and fantastical
—LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026

This rich tapestry is a world unto itself. Mukasonga’s long engagement with some of the most difficult subjects of our time remains a sustained masterclass in probing subtlety, clear complexity, and literary daring. In Murmurs from the Hills, Mukasonga’s entrancing hybrid storytelling reveals the profoundly entangled web of human activity that makes monstrous intersections of art, culture, and ideology. What’s more, the complexities of human existence that arise in this book prove as haunting, surreal and philosophical and they are enigmatic realms of the unsettling presence of the mundane. These tales, though expressly Rwandan, transcend the abasing debts humans continue to collect from terrible histories anywhere. A tall work from a soaring talent.
—Canisia Lubrin

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it