From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature comes a memoir of childhood and legacy.In 1948, a young J. M. G. Le Clézio left behind a 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 dazzled discovery of freedom in the African savannah and the torment of recalling his fractured relationship with a rigid, authoritarian father.Now available to UK readers in English for the first time, The African is a poignant memoir of a lost childhood and a tribute to a father whom Le Clézio never really knew. His legacy is the passionate anti-colonialism that the author has carried through his life.

J. M. G. Le Clézio was born in Nice in 1940, the descendant of a family from Brittany that emigrated to Mauritius in the eighteenth century. He is the author of more than forty books and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008.