Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was born in Dakar in 1990. He studied literature and philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Brotherhood, his first novel (Europa, 2021), won the Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, and the French Voices Grand Prize. In 2018, he became the youngest writer to have been awarded the World Literature Prize, for his second novel, Silence of the Choir. His third novel, The Most Secret Memory of Men (Other Press, 2023), won the 2021 Goncourt Prize and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award.

Seventy-two men arrive in the middle of the Sicilian countryside. They are "immigrants," "refugees" or "migrants." But in Altino, they're called the ragazzi, the "guys" that the Santa Marta Association have taken responsibility for. In this small Sicilian town, their arrival changes life for everybody. While they wait to know their fate, the ragazzi encounter all kinds of people: a strange vicar who rewrites their pasts, a woman committed to ensuring them asylum, a man determined to fight against it, an older ragazzo who has become an interpreter, and a reclusive poet who no longer writes.