Behind the bars on her window, Rosa Maria dreams of sunshine, love, calm, and leaving the city where she lives with her family. She suffers her father's beatings, hides her femininity behind shapeless clothing, and pines for the beautiful Jason as she awaits her opportunity to flee. Meanwhile, her older brother is found dead in a nearby parking lot, and the neighborhood explodes in a riot against the police. Rosa Maria resolves to act before she is devoured by family intrigues and despair. Wilfried N'Sonde's powerful voice creates a palpable sense of the absence of hope and the social and racial isolation that pervade the Paris projects, even as he never abandons the expansive capacity of individuals to dream of better lives beyond a seemingly hopeless reality.

A nameless young man lives in the housing projects outside of Paris. When he was a child, his parents moved with him from the Congo to France, hoping in vain to escape poverty and violence. His best friend, Drissa, is in a psychiatric hospital and now Mireille, his girlfriend, the woman with whom he has shared his childhood and hopes, has left him to reconnect with her Jewish roots in Israel. During a night out to drown the pain of his heartache, there is a fight with a policeman, the policeman dies, and the young man is arrested and taken to jail. Between police beatings and abrupt interrogations, his memory becomes his sole ally to escape from the exiguous space in which he is confined. Half-conscious and delirious, he reflects on his journey from the land of his ancestors to his life in the projects with Drissa and Mireille. In The Heart of the Leopard Children, N'Sonde explores the themes of love and pain, belonging and uprooting, desire and fear-all with an implacable and irresistible accuracy. Wilfried N'Sonde's first novel awakens the reader with an urban symphony of desire and lost love, attuned to the violence that accompanies the struggle for social ascension and a sense of belonging, and the paralyzing sentiment of betrayal that inhabits a young man caught between traditions and cultures. Awarded the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Senghor for the originality of his work, the author captures the sounds, rhythms and pleas of a young man who pulls on the alarm from his prison cell to warn against the multiple barriers of confinement that risk the future of certain sectors of French youth today.

What are the limits of empathy and forgiveness? How can someone with a shameful past find a new path that allows for both healing and reckoning? When Clovis and Christelle find themselves face-to-face on a train heading to the outskirts of Paris, their unexpected encounter propels them on a cathartic journey toward understanding the other, mediated by their respective histories of violence. Clovis, a young undocumented African, struggles with the pain and shame of his brutal childhood, abusive exploits as a child soldier, and road to exile. Christelle, a young French nurse, has her own dark experiences but translates her suffering into an unusual capacity for empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Christelle opens her home and heart to Clovis and presses him to tell his story. But how will she react to that story? Will the telling start Clovis on a path to redemption or alienate him further from French society? Wilfried N'Sonde's brave novel confronts French attitudes toward immigrants, pushes moral imagination to its limits, and constructs a world where the past must be confronted in order to map the future.