The Antelope's Strategy by Jean Hatzfeld (translated by Linda Coverdale)

The journalist Jean Hatzfeld was born to Jewish parents who had fled to Madagascar during World War II. He was raised in France and first travelled to Rwanda in 1994, the year of the massacre. He hasn’t stopped writing about it since. As Hatzfeld admits, he is ‘obsessed’ with the history of Rwanda’s genocide, in which Hutu militias killed approximately 800,000 Tutsis over a 100-day period, primarily using clubs and machetes.

Hence the title of his stunning Machete Season, which collects Hatzfeld’s interviews with the killers. Life Laid Bare, a companion volume, provides an oral history from the survivors’ point of view. Both books are astonishing, but this latest book on the atrocities may be the most intriguing of the trilogy, combining the voices of both perpetrators and survivors to examine the thorny and frustrating issue of national reconciliation. In January 2003, a presidential decree released a group of 40,000 killers convicted of genocide from prison. The Antelope’s Strategy – named after the scattering technique of groups of hunted Tutsis running in the forest – catches up with the speakers of his previous two books as they struggle to cohabit in the farming region of Nyamata.

A lucid account of tangled reconciliation efforts, the book coolly observes both national and local politics in a country where ex-killers can now be community court judges. But mostly, it probes the nature of forgiveness, and remorse, without ever presenting a concrete picture of what either might mean. In one episode, a Tutsi survivor marries a man who probably killed members of her family. The Antelope’s Strategy weighs important factual information with an exploration of individual lives and the big questions that motivate Hatzfeld’s fascination with genocide – namely, how people speak about it and record it in its terrible aftermath.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25). Get it from Amazon.