The Sky above the Roof: A Novel

By Nathacha Appanah and Geoffrey Strachan

A propulsive, kaleidoscopic novel about a fractured family and the persistence of hope

It all begins with a crash.

One night, seventeen-year-old Wolf steals his mother’s car and drives six hundred kilometers in search of his sister, who left home ten years ago. Unlicensed and on edge, he veers onto the wrong side of the road and causes an accident. He is arrested and incarcerated, forcing his mother and sister to reconnect and pick up the pieces in order to fight for his release.

What follows is a lyrical, precise, and unflinching account of the events that lead to this moment, told through the alternating perspectives of Wolf’s mother, sister, and grandfather, as well as the doctor who was present at Wolf’s birth. With each chapter, new versions of the story and views of reality unfold, and they fit together like puzzle pieces: in an uncertain order at first, and then slowly falling neatly into place as the pages turn. As details about the characters’ lives and the disconnections in their relationships are revealed, the story becomes even more propulsive, even more compelling.

In this raw and poignant novel, Nathacha Appanah considers how trauma shapes generations and the wounds it leaves behind. The Sky above the Roof is both a portrait of a fractured family and a poetic exploration of the ways we break apart and rebuild.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781644452264

Nathacha Appanah

NATHACHA APPANAH, a French-Mauritian of Indian origin, was born in Mauritius and worked there as a journalist before moving to France in 1998. The Last Brother, her fourth novel, won the Prix de la FNAC 2007 and the Grand Prix des Lecteurs de L'Express 2008.

Book preview

Monday morning but this is not the start of it all

Suddenly there is this strange, muffled calm, like a sheet laid over him, enveloping him completely. Through this imaginary fabric he studies the faces of the two men in uniform opposite him and sees nothing threatening about them. They are just two men coming along with him, that’s all, why make a fuss, they are unclear figures, and, with his habit of finding rhymes for words inside his head, he tells himself that what is unclear is also near and quite dear. They are like clouds, like a drawing smudged with a finger, like the depths of water, like mist over the town. Behind the two men there is a window and past it a calm and blue sky speeds by, sometimes the tops of a few trees, and when the vehicle stops, the boy seeks something his eyes can fasten onto, a bird, a leaf in the wind, a power line. The things he can hear seem to him to be coming from a long way off: the sound of the engine, his own breathing, calmer now, his heart beating softly. He looks down at his hands, held fast by handcuffs (ruffs, muffs). He’s waiting for something to happen because, for as long as he can remember, he has never been able to endure being shut in or restrained.

He’s waiting for this thing to happen, even if it never simply happens. In fact what occurs is an eruption, things are turned upside down, there is an explosion of