Machete Season

A veteran foreign correspondent, Jean Hatzfeld gathers the testimony of men convicted for their part in the Rwandan genocide. He had first written about survivors, and readers of that earlier book pushed him to hear from the killers. With help from a Rwandan interpreter he met a group of friends, most of them farmers from the hills around Nyamata, in prison in 2001 and 2002, interviewing each alone and in confidence. In the spring of 1994 they had killed their Tutsi neighbours. Hatzfeld groups their accounts by theme, adds his own commentary and historical summaries, and offers no overall conclusion. Éditions du Seuil published the French original in 2003, and Linda Coverdale translated it into English.

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