Marie, a nurse on the island of Mayotte, adopts an abandoned baby and names him Moïse, raising him as a French boy. As he grows up, Moïse struggles with his status as an "outsider" and to understand why he was abandoned as a baby. When Marie dies, he is left alone, plunged into uncertainty and turmoil, ending up in the largest and most infamous slum on Mayotte, nicknamed "Gaza".
Narrated by five different characters, Tropic of Violence is an exploration of lost youth on the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. Shining a powerful light on problems of violence, immigration, identity, deprivation and isolation on this island that became a French département in 2011, it is a remarkable, unsettling new novel that draws on the author's own observations from her time on Mayotte.
Nathacha Appanah, was born in Mauritius in 1973. She was brought up there and worked as a journalist before moving to France in 1998. The Last Brother, her first novel to be translated into English, was awarded the FNAC Fiction Prize in 2007 in its French edition. Her novel Tropic of Violence was winner of the Prix Femina des Lyceens in 2016, as well as seven other French literary awards.