“I’m Sadiq. Everyone calls me Sad. There’s a fine line between sadness and cruelty. Eve is my reason for being, but she pretends not to know it. When she passes me, her gaze passes right through me without pausing. I disappear. I’m in a gray place. Or rather, a yellowish-brown one, which truly lives up to its name: Troumaron.

Troumaron is a sort of funnel; the final chokepoint where the wastewater from an entire country flows. Here, they house cyclone refugees—those who couldn’t find shelter after a tropical storm and who, two or five or ten or twenty years later, still have their toes in the water and their eyes pale from the rain.” Through Sad, Ève, Savita, and Clélio—these teenagers with battered destinies trapped in a heinous crime—and thanks to her writing style, which channels restrained violence to create a suspenseful narrative of great subtlety, Ananda Devi reveals the other Mauritius of the 21st century, the one that isn’t just left out of tourist brochures.