For Gabon, I read The Fury and Cries of Women by Angèle Rawiri, translated from the French by Sara Hanaburgh and wow, this book was INTENSE. It may not be the darkest book I’ve read for my quest–that award probably goes to The Piano Teacher (Austria) — but it definitely deserves an honorable mention.

I do not often gives trigger warnings, but this book basically needed trigger warnings at the beginning of every chapter. The story begins with a graphic and disturbing scene of a miscarriage and that’s just the beginning of all the bad shit that happens. When I was in high school, if I needed to “process my dark feelings,” I listened to Portishead. The Fury and Cries of Women is the closest literary equivalent I’ve ever found to Portishead’s energy.

This book was published in 1989, and Rawiri used it as a platform to discuss all sorts of difficult (and often taboo) subjects that faced African women in the 1980s, like infertility infidelity, tensions between older and younger generations, and feminism. It is a feminist novel, but it’s not the feminism I was taught as a young woman attending an all-girls Catholic high school in Los Angeles in the 1990s. That’s not to say this book’s version of feminism is “bad” or “wrong.” It’s just different, and yet another reminder of why my Read Around the World quest feels so urgent.

If you are a feminist looking for a challenging book, then I heartily recommend The Fury and Cries of Women, but I’m not going to be forcing this book on everyone I know and love. You have to be in the right mindset for it. Even though I wanted to read it, it was brutal and I had to read it as quickly as possible because this is the sort of book that drains my energy and leaves me feeling devastated for fictional women I’ll never meet.