Praise for The Barefoot Woman:

   • "The Barefoot Woman powerfully continues the tradition of women's work it so lovingly recounts. In Mukasonga's village, the women were in charge of the fire...In her work - six searing books and counting - she has become the keeper of the flame." - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

   • The Barefoot Woman is simultaneously a powerful work of witness and memorial, a loving act of reconstruction, and an unflinching reckoning with the Rwandan Civil War...An essential and powerful read. - Zadie Smith

   • "A profoundly affecting memoir of a mother lost to ethnic violence. . . A loving, urgent memorial to people now "deep in the jumble of some ossuary" who might otherwise be forgotten in time." - Kirkus Reviews, starred

   • "In this elegant and lyrical memoir, Scholastique Mukasonga tells the story of her mother, Stefania, one of thirty-seven of Mukasonga's family members who was eventually killed in the Rwandan genocide. In these pages, Stefania lives as the heart of her exiled Tutsi community, a determined, funny, and graceful woman who keeps watch over the neighborhood on her termite mound, acts as a matchmaker and healer, and obsessively plots her children's escape. Mukasonga masterfully conveys how the joys of daily life can co-exist with horror and Jordan Stump's translation honors this outstanding storyteller and her remarkable personal history." - NBA Judge's Citation

   • "The memories of childhood, a lost home, a mother who sacrificed herself are the pounding heart of the book, and Mukasonga has produced a work that anyone who might read it will remember." -Eleni Theodoropoulos, Literary Hub, Best Translated Novels of the Decade

   • "Mukasonga is a master of subtle shifts in register - a skill inherited, perhaps, from the Rwandan traditions of intricate courtesy and assiduous privacy that Stefania maintained. She turns everything over restlessly: In her prose, poignant reminiscences sharpen into bitter ironies, or laments reveal flashes of comedy, determination, defiance." -- Julian Lucas, The New York Times

   • "The Barefoot Woman is a resonant revelation." -Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor