African quatuor of award-winning novels on the Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi

The African Quatuor of Albert Russo includes the author’s award-winning novels set in the former Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi, with historical facts which will surprise the English-speaking readers who are only aware of the often distorted reports they gather in today’s media, that do not differentiate between the cruel era of King Léopold II and the Belgian Congo, created in 1908, after the international scandal. – James Baldwin's words to the author, penned the year of his death: «I like your work very much indeed. It has a very gentle surface and a savage under-tow. You're a dangerous man.» – Edmund White: «Albert Russo has recreated through a young African boy's joys and struggles many of the tensions of modern life, straight and gay, black and white, third world and first … all of these tensions underlie this story of a biracial child adopted by a benevolent American. Adopted by an American in the Belgian Congo is a non-stop, gripping read!» – World Literature Today: “In Léodine of the Belgian Congo, the reader will find, as in the thre other novels, Princes and Gods, Eur-African Exiles and Adopted by an American in the Belgian Congo, many poignant and delightful passages, especially in the journeys across the magnificent Kivu province, which today, along with bordering Rwanda and Burundi, has been scarred by fratricidal wars. That Leodine, in the opening novel, happens to be an adolescent, as was Leopold in Adopted by an American in the Belgian Congo, isn’t fortuitous, for it is at that vulnerable period of one’s life that one’s personality takes form. In Albert Russo’s Africa you will find humankind’s infinite diversity and, amid such richness, a quest for the deep self.”