January 2: Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron

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Winner of the Bellwether Prize—an annual prize selected by Barbara Kingsolver and given to a novel that addresses issues of social justice—Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron follows a talented young athlete in Rwanda just before the genocide in the 1990s.

Jean Patrick Nkuba is a Tutsi boy whose dream is to go to the Olympics and represent the country he and his family have loved for generations. Civil unrest between the governing Hutus and the Rwandan Patriotic Force, a Tutsi-led army, escalates as Jean Patrick comes very close to realizing his dreams. Suffering the fatal loss of friends and family, the young athlete becomes a puppet for each side. After falling in love with a beautiful woman who is an anti-government activist, the promising runner is forced into a complicated web of political posturing, with dire results.

Jean Patrick finds that representing a country on the brink of a civil war to the broader world creates so many layers of distrust and bullying that his only recourse is to run far away from his dream in order to survive.

Drawing on her experiences teaching and volunteering in Rwanda, Benaron tells of a horrendous tragedy, even as she evokes the goodness of the human spirit. This powerful novel is the kind of book that profoundly illustrates a depth of human experience that most of us only know through the headlines.



Bellwether Prize announcement for Running the Rift (Link)
Naomi Benaron’s January 19th visit to Wichita (Link)
Naomi Benaron’s website (Link)