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

[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.