Summary

This guide is based on the following version of the book: Faya, Gaël. Small Country. Hogarth: London, New York. Translated by Sarah Ardizzone. 2018.

Small Country is a novel told in the first person from the perspective of Gabriel, a young boy of French and Rwandan descent growing up in Burundi in the 1990s. With the exception of the first and final sections, the novel is broken up into chapters numbered 1-31. In the section titled “Prologue,” Gabriel reflects on a moment in his childhood when his father tried to explain to him the differences between Hutus and Tutsis. The Hutus are generally short with broad noses, Papa explains, while the Tutsis are “tall and skinny with long noses and you can never tell what’s going on inside their heads” (1). Gabriel’s mother, called Maman in the text, is Tutsi. When...