Six books by writers from Mauritius, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with The Last Brother and Eve Out of Her Ruins.
J.M.G. Le Clézio, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008 and has Mauritian roots, is the best-known name linked to Mauritius. Writers on the island work in French, English and Mauritian Creole, and the country's history of sugar plantations, slavery and, from the 1830s, indentured labourers from India runs through much of their fiction. Mauritius became independent in 1968.
Nathacha Appanah's The Last Brother, translated from French, is set in 1940s Mauritius, where Jewish refugees were held at Beau Bassin prison. Ananda Devi's Eve Out of Her Ruins portrays four young people in the Troumaron slum of Port Louis, far from the tourist image. Shenaz Patel's Silence of the Chagos tells of Chagossians deported from their islands to Port Louis slums. In Mutiny, Lindsey Collen, who writes in English, uses a women's prison to look at class, gender and politics.
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Wartime 1940s Mauritius, where Jewish refugees were detained at Beau Bassin prison, seen through a poor boy's eyes in a sugar-cane society.
Four young people in the Troumaron slum of Port Louis, showing poverty, violence and ethnic tension beneath the tourist image.
Follows Chagossians deported from their islands to Port Louis slums, tying Mauritian history to exile and colonial politics.
A women's prison and a wider uprising illuminate class, gender, language and politics in late-20th-century Mauritius.
A fierce Mauritian novel of violence, feminism and myth, drawing on the island's Hindu, Creole and Indian Ocean cultural mix.
A short novel of an Indo-Mauritian girl's forbidden love, set in a close-knit community among the island's coastal and social divides.
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