In 1994 the Rwandan government implemented a policy for the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi majority.

In April-May 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens--about 10,000 a day, mostly being hacked to death by machete. In Machete Season, the veteran foreign correspondent Jean Hatzfeld reports on the results of his interviews with nine of the Hutu killers. They were all friends who came from a single region where they helped to kill 50,000 out of their 59,000 Tutsi neighbors, and all of them are now in prison, some awaiting execution. It is usually presumed that killers will not tell the truth about their brutal actions, but Hatzfeld elicited extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they had perpetrated. He rightly sees that their account raises as many questions as it answers. Adabert, Alphonse, Ignace, and the others (most of them farmers) told Hatzfeld how the work was given to them, what they thought about it, how they did it, and what their responses were to the bloodbath. "Killing is easier than farming," one says. "I got into it, no problem," says another. Each describes what it was like the first time he killed someone, what he felt like when he killed a mother and child, how he reacted when he killed a cordial acquaintance, how 'cutting' a person with a machete differed from 'cutting' a calf or a sugarcane. And they had plenty of time to tell Hatzfeld, too, about whether and why they had reconsidered their motives, their moral responsibility, their guilt, remorse, or indifference to the crimes. Hatzfeld's meditation on the banal, horrific testimony of the genocidaires and what it means is lucid, humane, and wise: he relates the Rwanda horror to war crimes and to other genocidal episodes in human history. Especially since the Holocaust, it has been conventional to presume that only depraved and monstrous evil incarnate could perpetrate such crimes, but it may be, he suggests, that such actions are within the realm of ordinary human conduct. To read this disturbing, enlightening and very brave book is to consider in a new light the foundation of human morality and ethics.

Standard Operating Procedure is an utterly original collaboration by the writer Philip Gourevitch (We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families) and the film-maker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War). They have produced the first full reckoning of what actually happened at Abu Ghraib. Standard Operating Procedure reveals the stories of the American soldiers who took and appeared in the haunting digital snapshots from Abu Ghraib prison that shocked the world – and simultaneously illuminates and alters forever our understanding of those images and the events they depict. Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris’s startlingly frank and intimate interviews with Americans who served at Abu Ghraib and with some of their Iraqi prisoners, as well as on his own research, Philip Gourevitch has written a relentlessly surprising account of Iraq’s occupation from the inside-out – rendering vivid portraits of guards and prisoners ensnared in an appalling breakdown of command authority and moral order. Gourevitch and Morris have crafted a nonfiction morality play that stands to endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines. By taking us deep into the voices and characters of the men and women who lived the horror of Abu Ghraib, the authors force us, whatever our politics, to re-examine the pat explanations in which we have been offered – or sought – refuge, and to see afresh this watershed episode. Instead of a ‘few bad apples’, we are confronted with disturbingly ordinary young American men and women who have been dropped into something out of Dante’s Inferno. This is a book that makes you think, and makes you see – an essential contribution from two of our finest nonfiction artists working at the peak of their powers.

**Winner of the Guardian First Book award** 'I know few books, fiction or non-fiction, as compelling as Philip Gourevitch's account of the Rwandan genocide' - Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm 'Should be compulsory reading' - The Guardian In 1994, the Rwandan government orchestrated a campaign of extermination, in which everyone in the Hutu majority was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Close to a million people were slaughtered in a hundred days, and the rest of the world did nothing to stop it. A year later, journalist Philip Gourevitch went to Rwanda to investigate the most unambiguous genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Hailed by the Guardian as one of the hundred greatest non-fiction books of all time, and now celebrated as part of the Picador Collection, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families is an unforgettable anatomy of Rwanda's decimation. As riveting as it is moving, it is a profound reckoning with humanity's betrayal and its perseverance. 'Gourevitch constructs a powerful indictment against international inaction' - Observer 'Magnificent, terrifying' - The Irish Times

The highly anticipated and timely follow-up to Philip Gourevitch’s award-winning bestseller We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. Philip Gourevitch's unforgettable modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority: Close to a million people were murdered by their neighbors in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us an astonishingly vivid and intimate exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, denial and confession, vengefulness and forgiveness. A fiercely beautiful literary reckoning, You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know—the culmination of twenty-five years of reporting on the aftermath of the slaughter—takes its title from a stark Rwandan adage that speaks to the uneasy trade-offs that reconciliation after near annihilation demands. Since the genocide, Rwanda has engaged in the most ambitious and sweeping process of accountability ever undertaken by any society. “Truth Heals” was the slogan. But truth also wounds. And truth is always contested. As Gourevitch returns repeatedly over the decades to the same families in one hillside village, their accounts of killing and surviving, and of the life after, inform and enlarge one another, becoming ever more complex and charged with significance. These stories are at once as essential and as extreme as classical myths, illuminating the ways that we seek, individually and collectively, to negotiate our irreparable pasts in pursuit of a more habitable future. This deeply moving book continuously invites us—as only great writing can—to think, and to think again.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable debut book from Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title. With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa. Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.