This Is Not Who We Are

Iris and Victoria are pen-pals. One day Victoria’s letters from Rwanda suddenly stop. In Paris, Iris can only wonder why. Through her father’s work she knows a terrible genocide has taken place. Still haunted by the loss of her penfriend, twenty years later Iris – now a journalist in London – pitches a story to her editor: she will try to find Victoria. The past twenty years for Victoria have been ones of migration, to Goma, Paris and finally London, and of starting a new life. As she makes her way, her past catches up in the shape of her genocide-supporting brother. Meanwhile, the more Iris looks the more her own past looms. What was her father’s role in Rwanda? Are her childhood memories more fiction than fact? Why is she looking for Victoria, really? This Is Not Who We Are is a gripping story of two women, and the cost of family secrets. It is also a thought-provoking narrative of how history impacts on the individual, of how we make sense of the past, of women in the First and Third Worlds, and of the world of migration.