Join us to celebrate the launch of Penarth-based author Sophie Buchaillard’s debut novel This Is Not Who We Are.

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In April 1994, the plane of the President of Rwanda was shot down over Kigali. His murder sparked a mass extermination of the Tutsi population and any Hutu who supported them which lasted 100 days, led to the gruesome death of 800,000 people, and was systematically ignored by the international community. 

In the summer of 1994, two sixteen-year-old girls exchanged an unlikely correspondence. Iris, a French girl, growing up in Paris and Victoria, a Rwandan refugee in the camp of Goma, Zaïre. One day, the letters stopped. What became of Victoria? Was Iris’s father somehow involved in the genocide? 

Twenty years on, Iris, now a mother and journalist living in London, is haunted by the fate of her former pen friend. She pitches a story to her editor and sets out to find out what happened to Victoria. The more she looks, the more questions emerge about her own father, her childhood memories and what motivates her search after so many years. 

This Is Not Who We Are is the story of those two women, and the cost of family secrets.

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Sophie Buchaillard was born in Paris and lived in Bordeaux, Salamanca, Merrill (NY) and London, settling in South Wales in 2001, almost by accident. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Wales Arts Review, The Friday Poem, Murmurations Magazine, the Other Side of Hope and Square Wheel Press. She co-hosts the Writers on Reading podcast and tutors in creative writing. This Is Not Who We Are (Seren Books) is her debut novel.

Author photo by Aga Hosking.

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Tickets: £5.00 including a drink OR £12.50 including a SIGNED paperback copy of This Is Not Who We Are (RRP: £9.99) and a drink.