Praise
Magnificent . . . Mukasonga compresses an epic of the king’s resistance and the grandfather’s dangerous devotion to him, all while crafting in the grandfather’s voice a poignant elegy for a cursed nation (“I fear that the rituals will be neglected, and then our Rwanda will crumble and perhaps the whole world will crumble”). Each of these stories is a treasure.
This rich tapestry is a world unto itself. Mukasonga’s long engagement with some of the most difficult subjects of our time remains a sustained masterclass in probing subtlety, clear complexity, and literary daring. In Murmurs from the Hills, Mukasonga’s entrancing hybrid storytelling reveals the profoundly entangled web of human activity that makes monstrous intersections of art, culture, and ideology. What’s more, the complexities of human existence that arise in this book prove as haunting, surreal and philosophical and they are enigmatic realms of the unsettling presence of the mundane. These tales, though expressly Rwandan, transcend the abasing debts humans continue to collect from terrible histories anywhere. A tall work from a soaring talent.
— Canisia Lubrin
The stories in Murmurs from the Hills reach deep into pre-colonial Rwandan history. How can distant times inform a nation and a people? Through connections to stories told over centuries, both real and fantastical.
— LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026
Murmurs from the Hills sings—of memory, of folklore, of personal and larger histories. At once intimate and expansive, this gorgeous and evocative collection casts a spell through which Rwanda’s past echoes.
— NoViolet Bulawayo
In sentences of great beauty and restraint, Mukasonga rescues a million souls from the collective noun ‘genocide,’ returning them to us as individual human beings.
— Zadie Smith
Distinctive and revelatory . . . the thoughtful storytelling preserves cultural memory while cultivating a deeper understanding of Rwandans’ history, traditions, and enduring resilience. A moving short story collection, Murmurs from the Hills explores the torments and hopes of a nation’s people.
— Defne Tekin, Foreword Reviews
[Murmurs From the Hills'] overlapping voices and collective knowledge reinvigorate the past . . . Mukasonga’s work is known for its unflinching engagement with the 1994 Tutsi genocide . . . Murmurs from the Hills builds on this work by looking back into the pre-colonial past to imagine a future.
Murmurs from the Hills . . . adds another chapter to one of the most vital ongoing translation projects in contemporary letters, one that continues to insist, in Mukasonga’s own words, that Rwanda’s painful history need not hold its people hostage.
As she always has, Mukasonga writes clearly and affectingly of difficult history, deftly inserting—without didactic pronouncements—references to German colonialism, Belgian domination, forced Christian catechism, racial segregation, and fatal bloodshed. Remarkable, too, is her seamless ability to integrate gentle levity and surprising humor. Expressive, startling, poignant, Mukasonga's stories capture a Rwanda long vanished, superbly recorded to enjoy in perpetuity.
The six tales recounted here mix memoir with fiction, local folklore, and rural Rwandan understandings of Western European doctrine . . . Mukasonga relates these events from the perspective of a girl and then a woman, whose responsibilities and life choices, in Rwanda, tend to be more narrowly circumscribed than those made available to men. . . Mark Polizzotti’s translation is artfully phrased in idiomatic English that never brings attention to itself, letting Mukasonga’s story brook along effortlessly.
Murmurs from the Hills reads like a love letter from Scholastique Mukasonga to herself, to her writing, her history, and all the places and people that made her . . . this spectacular new collection of stories is outstandingly hopeful, curious, and mystically funny. These are stories of girlhood, legend, situationships, nature, family, books, commitment: the patchwork quilt of your life, stitched together from sorrow and satisfaction.
Tales read as though spoken by a wizened elder "at night at the hour tales were told." Mukasonga's stories meld history, lore, and human nature for readers who wish to encounter the beauty and tragedy of Rwanda through literature.
— Kelly Fojtik, Booklist
