This Strange Eventful History: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024

by Claire Messud

448 pages, Paperback

Published May 22, 2025

About the author

Claire Messud is an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the novel The Emperor's Children (2006).

Reviews

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Family sagas are one of my favorite reads. I search them out and will often choose a book I am only mildly interested in if it promises a good family saga. This has been sitting on my shelf for quite awhile. I used both the audio narrated by Cassandra Campbell which was excellent and the print paperback for this reading.

It is another example of a historical fiction where the author's note at the end proves more enlightening than the 400+ pages of the novel. I'd like Messud's book Emperor's Children and found her a good story teller but was looking for more historical depth than I found here.

It is the story of an Algerian family starting in the early days of WWII and following a husband and wife, their son and daughter and the son's two daughters through the next 70 years. I was hoping for more Algerian history but found it only as an occasional back drop but I did learn much about this North African country that I never knew. So long colonized by the French that this Algerian family morns when their homeland wins independence and is no more considered French. But even before this change this family feels itself without a home.

I can't even begin to describe all the many moves of this family throughout the late 1900's and into the early 2000's. From Greece to Algeria, from Algeria to Argentina, Argentina to Amherst to Toronto, to Australia to France and I probably left a few out. Much of the book is taken up with describing places and abodes while the action or drama is slow and mostly internal among the family members and their problems.

It was a slow read that took me awhile to decide to finish. I'm on the fence as far as a recommendation. The ending segment was rewarding but the author did spend much too much time in the deaths of the older family members as they fell into ill health one by one and so so slowly succumbed. That part of the story could easily be much improved with a paragraph or too rather than the pages and pages written.

I will be most interested to see how much of it sticks in my memory. My guess is it made more of an impression than I realize especially the parts about the weight of words.

[Barbara Brydges · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird to give a 3 stars to a book that I didn’t finish but there’s a reason that it was a Booker Prize winner. It’s very well written and I thought I was going to love it after reading the first section set it Algeria at the time of the fall of France in World War II. After that it follows people in the same family in the ensuing decades as they live in different places - Canada, the United States and France. I got less-and-less interested in the people as the book went on because I never really felt I got inside any of them. And, finally, having read 3/4 of it, I gave up.

[Zozan Baran · Rating 4 out of 5]

A family saga and a political testimony to the 20th century.

What I loved about the book is how it narrates aging, which makes the book feel so alive.
Like we witness the protagonists growing up, changing from page to page, from lively youth with so many dreams to disillusioned adults, and then to bitter elderly. I felt like this was making the time the main protagonist of the book, similar to Proust's Lost Time.

[Ana-Patricia Pop · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Look at all the others with whom you share the boat. Beyond the most immediate, you can’t choose your companions for a crossing or a generation. You can’t know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain.”

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book narrating 70 years of a Algerian French family that becomes exiles and succeeding generations travel and settle on different continents. Well written from different viewpoints. Highly recommend.