In 1948, a young JMG Le Clezio left behind still-devastated Europe with his mother and brother to join his father, a military doctor in Nigeria, from whom he had been separated by the war. In his characteristically intimate, poetic voice, the Nobel Prize-winning author relates both the child's dazzle discovery of freedom in the African savannah and the torment of recalling his fractured relationship with a rigid, authoritarian father. Now available in English for the first time, 'The African' is a poignant memoir of a lost childhood and a tribute to a father whom he never really knew.
