The first novel to be translated from Wolof to English, Doomi Golo—The Hidden Notebooks is a masterful work that conveys the story of Nguirane Faye and his attempts to communicate with his grandson before he dies. With a narrative structure that beautifully imitates the movements of a musical piece, Diop relates Faye’s trauma of losing his only son, Assane Tall, which is compounded by his grandson Badou’s migration to an unknown destination. While Faye feels certain that his grandson will return one day, he also is convinced that he will no longer be alive by then. Faye spends his days sitting under a mango tree in the courtyard of his home, reminiscing and observing his surroundings. He speaks to Badou through his seven notebooks, six of which are revealed to the reader, while the seventh, the “Book of Secrets,” is highly confidential and reserved for Badou’s eyes only. In the absence of letters from Badou, the notebooks form the only possible means of communication between the two, carrying within them tunes and repetitions that give this novel its unusual shape: loose and meandering on the one hand, coherent and tightly interwoven on the other.

Dorcas Keurléonan-Moricet is a brilliant white geophysicist posted on assignment in Africa. She falls in love with a young African man, Ségué n’Di, and enters into an extramarital affair with him. In her professional work, she discovers deposits of minerals of inestimable worth. Reading the current age of globalization and neoliberalism as one in which the riches of Africa are again being cynically exploited by multinational companies—including her own—Keurléonan-Moricet’s views and her life gradually change. As the popular resistance against the dictatorial regime in power grows, she comes to play a key role in the unfolding political drama.