Join Guggenheim- and Radcliffe Fellow-winning writer Claire Messud for a reading of her latest fiction, followed by a discussion with CMC's own Professor of Literature Leland de la Durantaye.
Her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, was one of Oprah Daily's Most Anticipated Books of 2024, and one of New York Magazine's "23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024." Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.
Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is “a tour de force…one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).
