Jean Hatzfeld is a French journalist and reporter who spent many years as a correspondent for Libération at the world’s most dangerous armed conflicts — in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Rwanda. His hallmark is the patient, years-long building of relationships with people touched by collective violence, and the ability to draw from them testimony that seemed impossible to articulate. For his Rwandan trilogy he received France’s Prix Médicis.

The Antelope’s Strategy closes a cycle of three books devoted to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which between half a million and a million Tutsi were murdered within the space of a few weeks. The first volume, Into the Quick of Life, gave voice to survivors from the Nyamata marshes; the second, Machete Season, portrayed the perpetrators — Hutu who personally took part in the killing. The third returns to the same villages some years after the genocide, when some of the convicted Hutu had returned from prison or exile in Congo to stand face to face with their former victims.

Hatzfeld speaks with both sides: with Tutsi who must accept as neighbours once again those who murdered their families, and with Hutu who return to a community marked by guilt. These accounts, conducted without moralising and without easy answers, build a deeply affecting portrait of the conditions under which something that might be called reconciliation can — or cannot — begin to take root.

The title refers to the survival strategy employed by antelopes: flight in zigzags, without a plan, without certainty of escape. Just so — in zigzags, groping their way — the book’s protagonists try to live in a country that has officially proclaimed reconciliation but has yet to find words for it.