How did Eunice, a poor black girl from North Carolina, become the great Nina Simone, the multitalented diva with the incredible voice?

Nina Simone’s life is like a novel, and this is the very novel that Gilles Leroy has written, a puzzle painstakingly assembled piece by piece, recounting with great tenderness the singer’s story, at once completely true and utterly fictionalized, a life of swift successes and fatal disappointments. Gilles Leroy is the author of several novels, among them Alabama Song (Prix Goncourt 2007, translated into 29 languages) and Le diable emporte le fils rebelle [The Devil Takes the Rebel Son].