Port Sudan

An un-named Frenchman withdraws from his old life in Paris, a city he despises, and makes a new life for himself in Port Sudan, on the harsh, isolated coast of the Red Sea. It is there that the news reaches him that his old friend A has killed himself. 

The Frenchman returns to Paris to try to find out why. Moving among the people A knew, and piecing together the remains of his life, he finds no simple explanation. Instead, A’s death forces him to confront the failures of their friendship, their generation and the political hopes they once shared.

Olivier Rolin’s award-winning novella moves between the scorched, decaying port and a Paris stripped of its former glamour and promise. Bitter, sensuous and darkly comic, it is at once an investigation, an elegy and a meditation on political disillusionment, failed love, friendship and exile.

First published in France in 1994 and now translated into English for the first time by Matthew Escobar, Port Sudan is a fierce and haunting book about what remains when the convictions, relationships and places that once gave life meaning begin to fall away.