Solenn Honorine’s debut novel is the raw tale of a young Western aid worker who learns that her Congolese protégés have more to teach her than she ever expected.
The Air France agent at the counter upgrades the Médecins Sans Frontières worker to business class with a conspiratorial smile. She donates monthly, she confides. The passenger accepts graciously while privately comparing herself to Angelina Jolie racing toward disaster zones. Hours later the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed aid work rookie will be managing a cholera epidemic in eastern Congo, navigating armed checkpoints, and discovering that abandoned water pumps rust in the grass while she proposes installing identical new ones.
French writer Solenn Honorine’s debut novel opens La Route de Wakale with this gap between humanitarian mythology and actual practice, then spends 272 pages refusing to close it. Drawing on her own dual experience of years as a journalist for leading international media and a communications consultant on the front lines working for Médecins Sans Frontières across Africa and Haiti, she tells the story of Alix, a well-intentioned but naive 27-year-old water engineer.
272 pages, €21
Trying to escape suburban dreariness after her father’s death and a breakup, Alix is setting off on a nine-month project in North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Democratic in name only, as the realities on the ground will harshly prove.
The fictional town of Wakale sits in the long shadow of the Rwandan genocide, surrounded by eighteen rebel groups but enjoying two years of relative peace. This stability makes it a donor darling. NGOs proliferate. Development has become the primary local industry.
The structure creates tension from the start. Honorine opens with Alix in an ambulance racing through active conflict, then flashes back nine months. We know catastrophe is coming without knowing its form. When violence arrives, it forces impossible questions about medical neutrality. The principle requires treating everyone equally. The practice means providing care to someone who has just killed soldiers. Should the team transport him to hospital? Both yes and no feel wrong.
But the book refuses tidy moral categories. It rather chooses to show the realities in the field. A territorial administrator blocks official recognition of a cholera outbreak because he has brought unprecedented peace and faces upcoming elections. A refugee camp leader agrees enthusiastically to every water project, having learned that saying yes means temporary wages and functioning infrastructure until the equipment fails. And the incoming team finds perfectly good parts lying right next to the installation site. There was just no one who knew how to fix a small technical problem. Yet, there is no trace of judgement in Honorine’s writing, just a detached analysis.
The moral weight rests with Congolese characters who counterbalance the factual story. They are not relegated to the background figures but become heroes and demons in their own right. Dr. Ulrich was born in Wakale and stayed through decades of violence. For him, North Kivu is not a mission but home, and that distinction reshapes everything because his perspective cannot be temporary. Ineza, a Tutsi refugee, carries a history of survival that involved choices most people never have to contemplate. Major Mars, a former M23 rebel leader, talks suavely and eloquently about peace while consolidating power through methods that clearly speak another language. He has mastered rehabilitation as performance, which makes him compelling and dangerous.
These characters have agency, make decisions, possess understanding that exceeds what the humanitarian workers bring. Alix learns from them, but what she learns offers no comfort. The tone shifts as her idealism gets dismantled. Early sections include the absurdities of bureaucracy and cultural misunderstanding: aid workers joke to cope, meetings produce ridiculous outcomes, small disasters become team legends. But the humour darkens organically as competence proves insufficient and good intentions collide constantly with moral ambiguity.
The ending shows Alix back in France, unable to reconnect with her former life, considering another mission not because it will solve anything but because she cannot unsee what she has seen. Sometimes the insight gained is simply that trying proves insufficient. Sometimes you realize you are not the hero of this story, barely even a supporting character in dramas you will never fully comprehend. But sometimes, because of you, a child lives who would otherwise have died.
What makes Solenn Honorine’s book so special and such a captivating read is the elegant way she interweaves three different genres: a gripping novel, a candid memoir, and a precise journalistic field report. She builds protagonists you love or loathe but who don’t leave you indifferent. She captures how humanitarian work actually feels: exhausting, occasionally absurd, shot through with moments of genuine grace and frequent moral confusion. And her factual precision lends the story authority and credibility: tshukudus (wooden scooters with motorcycle handlebars), the chlorine reek of treatment centres, checkpoint theatrics where illiterate fighters hold documents upside down while scrutinizing them seriously. A dozen expatriates live behind five-metre walls topped with barbed wire, managing epidemic response, local politics, armed groups, and their own considerable egos. The title refers both to a physical road and to navigation through unmapped ethical terrain. But quite possibly also to a journey to one’s own self.
Her prose is sardonic without making light of genuine suffering, precise without becoming clinical. She writes from inside the system, unapologetically and devoid of illusions. This is the kind of clear-eyed reckoning the humanitarian sector rarely permits itself in public. The jargon, the way aid organisations see the humans they help as “beneficiaries” and statistics… but also the genuine will to do altruistic work and to truly care.
Honorine has called her MSF work “a window onto a real world, brutal often, cruel sometimes.” The novel carries that vision without sentiment or false hope. “For me, it’s not really the work that brings out the best and the worst of people; but when we work at MSF, go to the field, open our eyes and ears, we end up crossing path with the worst of humanity,” she explains. “But the hardships – the real hardships, not the “my Kindle stopped syncing” hardship – are what reveal the best in people.”
Just weeks after the September release, reviews are overwhelmingly positive. One comment has particularly stuck with the author. After her very first presentation in a bookshop, a reader told her that she had started into the novel in the evening and had stayed up all night to finish it in one go. “That’s probably the best compliment for a first-time novelist!”, Solenn says.
“I wanted to show what goes on behind the scenes, to go beyond the clichés of heroes rushing to the rescue of people in distress. The feedback that touches me the most is similar to this review, which describes La Route de Wakale as “a window onto a world that Westerners find difficult to understand and imagine.” Some colleagues have even told me that with this book, their loved ones will finally be able to understand the reality of their daily work.”
— Solenn Honorine
The book arrives as France and Europe reconsider relationships with former colonies and question whether development aid achieves its stated aims. It also arrives at a point where the current American administration has withdrawn much of its support to foreign aid agencies, forcing them to take a long, hard look at themselves in order to restructure. When asked about the journey that led up to this book, Solenn explains that this project began six years ago as a personal challenge: to leave journalism behind and venture into fiction. She never imagined it would be published during an unprecedented crisis for humanitarian action. “With Trump’s cuts exacerbating a general decline in funding for international aid, the very concept of international solidarity is being called into question. It’s infinitely sad… but today I hope this book can serve to show what we have to lose by saving money,” the author states.
Courtesy Solenn Honorine
Solenn Honorine offers no policy prescriptions, only an honest account of what survives when good intentions collide with intractable realities. La Route de Wakale simply asks difficult questions and is comfortable sitting with them.
La Route de Wakale by Solenn Honorine was published by L’Archipel on 4 September 2025 (272 pages, 21€). The author’s previous books were nonfiction: Indonésie (2012) and Mandela à vingt ans (2014).
Lead image courtesy Solenn Honorine; all other photos and images as credited
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