“There is no doubt that This is Not Who We Are will resonate with anyone who is interested in exploring topics such as identity, otherness, and the power of language, as well as those simply seeking a poignant and thought-provoking novel. Through her characters’ experiences, she highlights the complexities of language and the importance of confronting uncomfortable truths about our society. “Silence accommodates hate”, a character states. And through this book, Buchaillard reminds us that silence is not an option.”
Books Books
Category: Fiction, Literary Fiction, eBooks
Number of pages: 188
ISBN: 9781781726648
Publication date: June 13, 2022
Price: £9.99
Category: Fiction, Literary Fiction, eBooks
Number of pages: 188
ISBN: 9781781726655
Publication date: June 13, 2022
Price: £9.99
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2023
“…a stark and terrifying reminder that only the most fragile screen separates the familiar from the abyss.” – Richard Gwyn
1994, Iris and Victoria are pen friends. Iris writes about her life with her family in Paris. Victoria is in a refugee camp in Goma having fled the genocide in Rwanda in which thousands are being killed. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved.
Twenty years later Iris, a new mother, is working as a journalist in London. As she prepares to return to work, her thoughts turn to Victoria and what might have happened to her. She pitches a story to her editor which sets her on a journey to find her pen friend. But as she follows the story, things emerge that make her question her own past. Was her father, a French government official, somehow involved in the genocide? Are her childhood memories more fiction than fact? Why is she looking for Victoria, really?
For Victoria, the last twenty years have been ones of migration, to Goma, then to Paris and finally to London. There she starts a new life with her youngest brother Paul, and leaves the past behind. Or so she thinks until she is suddenly confronted with the decision to reconnect with her genocide-supporting middle brother Benjamin.
How have the lives of these two women, who shared a moment in time, changed in the past twenty years? As the pressure of long-kept family secrets builds, will they ever find each other?
Sophie Buchaillard
Sophie Buchaillard was born in Paris and lived in Bordeaux, Salamanca, Merrill (NY) and London, settling in South Wales in 2001, almost by accident.
Originally trained as a political scientist, she worked for student and environmental charities and the Higher Education sector for twenty years, as a researcher, a strategist and a policy advisor, set up a business as a leadership coach supporting women returning from maternity leave, and co-authored ‘Talented Women for a Successful Wales’, a report making recommendations to the Welsh Government on improving gender parity in business and education. In 2019, she left it all behind to undertake an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University, to fulfil her lifelong dream of becoming a writer and to show her children that it is never too late to follow your passion.
Sophie writes contemporary fiction inspired by her and her family’s travels, and short stories that reflect on the anxieties of our age. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Wales Arts Review, Murmurations Magazine, The Other Side of Hope and Square Wheel Press.
Now a doctoral candidate, she tutors in creative writing at Cardiff University, alongside writing her memoir and co-hosting a literary podcast @Writers_reading. She lives in Penarth with her husband and children.
For details of upcoming publications, follow Sophie on Twitter: @growriter and sign up to her newsletter on www.sophiebuchaillard.com
Sophie’s debut novel This Is Not Who We Are was published in June 2022.
Aline Moura, The Cardiff Review
“This is a powerfully empathetic and sensitive book, which reserves its real rage for the ideological fanatics who deliberately mutate anger at oppression into a specious salvationist enterprise… There is cautious hope, alongside a demand to acknowledge that the world’s wounds caused by such events as the Rwandan slaughter will need a lot of work to heal. ‘Language failed Rwanda’, we are told; yes, it did, but it can also be used to mend.”
Niall Griffiths, Nation.Cymru
“Skillful, succinct, and supremely fascinating book that manages to balance head and heart in equal measure. Beautifully written, but informed by true facts and therefore possessing a blend of imaginative elements and compelling socio-political aspects. A brilliant feat of balance between these, but with a poignant human story of friendship at its heart. This is a fantastic book with depths and depths, making it an utterly absorbing read.”
Mab Jones
“Sophie Buchaillard shows, subtly but persuasively, that a politically manufactured difference can have appalling, long-term and unresolved consequences. That is so resonant to our times, so relevant to the issues that we live with daily, that we are instantly sympathetic to Buchaillard’s starting point and aims… There’s much fine, restrained writing. ‘Parents see my skin, and they assume I am here to clean their children’s school.’ Or, on boarding a plane, ‘ “This way,’ he directs, as if to be swallowed by a giant metal snake was the most natural thing in the world.’… A novel to be recommended.”
Mark Blaney, Wales Arts Review
“A multi-layered and very moving novel about the Rwandan genocide and the culpability of the French government. The central idea of pen friends whose letter-writing is disrupted by war feels original and offers a fruitful way into this complex subject matter. An excellent debut and I can’t wait to see what Sophie Buchaillard writes next.”
Katherine Stansfield
“Timely questions regarding colonialism and the devastating way its impacts echo down the ages are sensitively explored… The story… succeeds in shedding fresh light on an atrocity that is far too little known in the West. That it does so through the eyes of a real girl who fell through the gaps of history affords it a poignancy that stays with you long after you’ve turned This Is Not Who We Are’s last page.”
Rachel Rees, Buzz Magazine
“Sophie Buchaillard’s novel is a stark and terrifying reminder that only the most fragile screen separates the familiar from the abyss, the comforts of home from the most obscene and extreme violence. It is an elegant and sombre reflection on what it means to retain one’s humanity in the face of a brutal and dehumanising cataclysm.”
Richard Gwyn
Watch all parts of our Q&A with Sophie Buchaillard on our Youtube channel
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