You will feel, in your body, the specific weight of a single four-second choice made by an exhausted, grieving twenty-year-old — and you will no longer be able to think of "translation" as a neutral, mechanical act. You will understand that institutions built to deliver justice are staffed by fallible people doing their best inside impossible constraints, and that acknowledging a mistake, decades on, can be its own form of courage rather than a betrayal of the dead.
The Provenance Novels · Cover revealed
The Faithful Word
Twenty-six years ago, in four seconds, she chose certainty over truth. It convicted a man who died still calling it a lie.
Four seconds. One verb. Twenty-five years of certainty.
The story
What waits inside
Immaculée Nsengimana has built her career on choosing the faithful word. From a soundproof booth in The Hague, she gives judges, witnesses, and defendants one another's voices with an accuracy few people ever question.
Then a young researcher sends her a recording from a war-crimes trial in 1999.
On the tape, an exhausted younger Imma hears herself translate an ambiguous Kinyarwanda verb as a statement of fact. Her choice helped convict a man who died in prison insisting that the court had misunderstood him. It may also have allowed the person who gave the real order to build a prosperous, respected life beyond suspicion.
Imma begins to retrace the record: the witness no one questioned twice, the supervisor who demanded clarity, and the grief she carried into the booth after surviving the violence the tribunal was created to judge. Each answer threatens not only her reputation, but an institution whose imperfect work still matters to the people it serves.
Speaking now cannot return the years already lost. Remaining silent will preserve a version of justice she no longer believes. Imma must decide whether admitting the truth is an act of repair, or one more injury delivered in the name of certainty.
A precise, morally charged literary thriller about translation, fallibility, and the courage required to correct the record too late.
In a room built to render one language's testimony into another's under an unforgiving four-second clock, the interpreter's confidence is the only evidence a court can act on — and confidence is not the same thing as accuracy.
Precision and rightness are not the same instrument. An institution trained to reward the sound of certainty will never ask what the certainty cost to produce — and a person who has confused the two her whole career can only find this out by testing it against a truth that no longer serves her comfort.
Interior previews
First pages arriving soon
When manuscript pages are ready, they will appear here as a lightweight gallery — designed for fast loading, sharp type, and quiet immersion.