Trying to finally reconcile with a past that has been haunting her throughout her life, Coco tells the story of her family across several generations, starting with the ancestor, Albert Louis, an ambitious man who left his land trying to recreate himself as a man with wealth, passing through his children and grandchildren, and ending with her herself: Coco,” the narrator feels she must tell this tale, and it will be the monument she builds to the dead. It is the debt that must be repaid. A story devoid of great executioners and venerable martyrs, but it will nonetheless have the weight of flesh and blood, because it is the story of its people, of their dreams and hopes, of their delusions, of their failures, and of their complex legacy from which the entire race suffers. “The Sinful Life” is a novel overflowing with interwoven stories and full of details that provide important testimony about the lives of middle-class families in the Caribbean. It was written by Maryse Conde, the Guadeloupe novelist who won the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018, with infinite sweetness and warmth, based largely on the history of... Her own family. She wrote it as a monument to build for the dead, thus paying off her debt as well.