Leïla Slimani is a Franco-Moroccan writer and journalist. She worked as a journalist at Jeune Afrique before becoming a novelist. Her widely acclaimed writing is daring and provocative, often pushing boundaries that make some people uncomfortable. This, her prize-winning novel, is about a sex-addicted woman in Paris who wants only one thing: to be wanted. Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored—and consumed by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making. Suspenseful, erotic, and electrically charged, Adèle is a captivating exploration of addiction, sexuality, and one woman's quest to feel alive. For French edition do an author search. [Dans le jardin de l'ogre : roman]

Ahmadou Kourouma was born in 1927 in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) when it was still under French colonial control. He went to Indochina on French military campaigns and later studied in Lyon. He returned to Côte d'Ivoire in 1960 after it won its independence from France and was imprisoned and later exiled for over a decade before he returned to his homeland to live. He writes fiction and has spent his life criticizing the treatment of post-colonial governments in Africa. His book "Allah n'est pas obligé" is about an orphan who becomes a child soldier when traveling to Liberia to see his aunt. [Allah is Not Obliged]

A woman, following a visit to Auschwitz, meditates on the possibility -- or impossibility -- of continuing to live, following the killing of millions in death camps. The subject is not new. But Louise Dupré makes this horror present again, while at the same time emphasising the need to go beyond it. Being a parent, as is the anonymous "you" in the book, is to both witness this horror and to raise children who are unaware of this terror, whose innocence seems to make perfect victims of them. It is to hold a child "above the flames", desperately seeking to protect them and, through them, to save ourselves. Louise Dupré is an award-winning Québécoise writer. She was director of Voix et Images: Litterature québécoise and taught at the University of Québec, Montréal. She was admitted to the Académie des lettres du Québec in 1999 and in 2002 into the Royal Society of Canada. She has won numerous awards including the Grand Prix de poésie, Prix Ringuet, and the Governor General's Award for French-language poetry for this book. [Plus haut que les flammes]

This is a good novel for intermediate students. Slightly more accessible than Anna Gavalda. Set against the translucent beauty of France in summer, Bonjour Tristesse is a bittersweet tale narrated by Cécile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the brink of womanhood, whose meddling in her father's love life leads to tragic consequences. Freed from boarding school, Cécile lives in unchecked enjoyment with her youngish, widowed father—an affectionate rogue, dissolute and promiscuous. Having accepted the constantly changing women in his life, Cécile pursues a sexual conquest of her own with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. Then, a new woman appears in her father's life. Feeling threatened but empowered, Cécile sets in motion a devastating plan that claims a surprising victim. Deceptively simple in structure, Bonjour Tristesse is a complex and beautifully composed portrait of casual amorality and a young woman's desperate attempt to understand and control the world around her. For French edition do an author search.

Michèle Audin is the author of several works of mathematical theory and history and also published a work on her anticolonialist father's torture, disappearance, and execution by the French during the Battle of Algiers.

An ambitious and highly entertaining novel of revisionist history from the author of the international bestseller HHhH, Laurent Binet's Civilizations is nothing less than a strangely believable counterfactual history of the modern world, fizzing with ideas about colonization, empire-building, and the eternal human quest for domination. It is an electrifying novel by one of Europe's most exciting writers. Freydis is a woman warrior and leader of a band of Viking explorers setting out to the south. They meet local tribes, exchange skills, are taken prisoner, and get as far as Panama. But nobody ultimately knows what became of them. Fast forward five hundred years to 1492 and we're reading the journals of Christopher Columbus, mid-Atlantic on his own famous voyage of exploration to the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. But he and his men are taken captive by Incas. Even as their suffering increases, his faith in his superiority, and in his mission, is unshaken. Thirty years later, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe in the ships stolen from Columbus. He finds a continent divided by religious and dynastic quarrels, the Spanish Inquisition, Luther's Reformation, capitalism, the miracle of the printing press, endless warmongering between the ruling monarchies, and constant threat from the Turks. But most of all he finds downtrodden populations ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent bestseller as a guidebook to acquiring power--Machiavelli's The Prince. The stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and Aztecs, and for a great war that will change history forever.

Camille sifts through letters of condolence after her mother's death when a strange, handwritten missive stops her short. At first she believes she received it by mistake. But then, a new letter arrives each week from a mysterious stranger, Louis, who seems intent on recounting the story of his first love, Annie. They were separated in the years before World War II when Annie befriended a wealthy, barren couple and fell victim to a merciless plot just as German troops arrive in Paris. But also awaiting Camille's discovery is the other side of the story, which will call into question Annie's innocence and reveal the devastating consequences of jealousy and revenge. As Camille reads on, she begins to realize that her own life may be the next chapter in this tragic story. Originally published in French as Le Confident, 2010, Plon.

Laure, a university teacher, is married, mother of two daughters and owner of a lodge. At 40, it seems to her to be the sum, not of her desires, but of effort and compromise. Clément, single, 50, is bored in finance, at the top of a glass tower, tired of the view it offers as much as of YouPorn. Laure should be worried rather than envy the militant rage that inhabit her eldest daughter, Véra. Clément does not envy anyone, except his dog. In nervous and sharp language, Maria Pourchet offers us a lively, powerful and funny novel on love, this dangerous affair. Maria Pourchet is a novelist and screenwriter. Fire is her sixth book. [Fire]

Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop's English-language historical fiction debut, At Night All Blood is Black, is a "powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel" (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called "Chocolat" soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man's Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa's mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German's severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa's deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn't a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man's descent into madness. This book is exceptionally violent.

Patrick Chamoiseau was born in Martinique in 1953 and is known for his work in the Créolité movement. He has won many awards including the Prix Goncourt in 1992 for his novel Texaco. Although he studied in Paris he returned to Martinique. "Poetry is at the service of nothing, nothing is at its service. It does not give orders and it does not receive any. It does not resist, it exists, that is how it is...To all that is contrary to the relational beauties of the living. When an unacceptable one arose somewhere, Édouard Glissant called me to tell me, 'We can't let this go!' He would press 'we can't.' It was always strange to me. We didn't have any power. We weren't connected to any power. We had only the fervor of our indignation. Yet it was on this fragility, to say the least trembling, that he based his right and his duty to intervene. beautiful human beings. I am not a poet, but, faced with the situation faced by migrants on all shores of the world, I imagined ́ that Édouard Glissant had called me, as some very vigilant friends called me. This declaration cannot act on the barbarity of borders and on the crimes committed there. It only serves to outline in us the way of another imaginary world. It's not a big deal. It is just a glimmer intended for the hygiene of the spirit. Perhaps one of those fireflies for the least of which Pier Paolo Pasolini would have given his life." Translated by Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck (Yale University Press, 2018). [Migrant Brothers]

Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize-shortlisted author of The Years. In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another's will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man's, and then he moves on, leaving her without a "master," bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life. Ernaux grew up in Normandy and is the recipient of countless prizes including Prix Renaudot for "La Place", Prix Marguerite-Duras for "Les Années", and the Prix de la langue française for the entirety of her oeuvre. For French edition do an author search. [Mémoire de fille]

Patrick Modiano is a master storyteller and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works often examine and re-examine the period of WWII, German occupation and French Resistance. In 2010 the German translation of his first work, La Place de l'Étoile, (a wartime novel about a Jewish collaborator) won the German Preis der SWR-Bestenliste from the Südwestrundfunk radio station and was termed a major post-Holocaust work. His novels have been translated into over 30 languages and he has a loyal following. Jean B., the narrator of Modiano's Honeymoon, is submerged in a world where day and night, past and present, have no demarcations. Having spent his adult life making documentary films about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career, and takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere. He pretends to fly to Rio to make another film, but instead returns to his own Parisian suburb to spend his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he had met twenty years before, and in whom he had recognized a spiritual anomie that seemed to reflect and justify his own. Little by little, their story takes on more reality than Jean's daily existence, as his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession. The New Yorker wrote, "Turning to invention to get at deeper realities of experience is fiction's righteous mission, and Honeymoon performs it beautifully. We all hold the keys to mysteries of our own making, Modiano tells us. If only we knew where we hid them." This is a singular literary experience, a masterpiece of world literature. Barbara Wright (Translator) For French edition do an author search. [Voyage de noces]

Anna Gavalda is an award-winning, much loved French author known for her short stories such as "Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attendre quelque part". She writes in humorous, frank prose, and covers wide-ranging topics in a candid manner. She is also a French teacher. This longer work was translated from the French by Alison Anderson. There is French film based on this novel with the famous actors Audrey Tautou and Guillaume Canet (2007). For French edition do an author search. [Emsemble c'est tout]

Originally published in French as En companie des homes in 2017. Tender and compassionate, this vivid, often heart-wrenching account of the courage of Ebola frontline workers caring for those ravaged by the disease is an important reminder of the human and emotional cost of tone of the worst epidemics of our age.-Elnathan John, author of Born on a Tuesday. [Available in French as En companie des hommes]

The award-winning, #1 internationally bestselling new novel by the author of The Perfect Nanny, about a woman in an interracial marriage whose fierce desire for autonomy parallels her adopted country's fight for independence. The world of men is just like the world of botany. In the end, one species dominates another. One day, the orange will win out over the lemon, or vice versa, and the tree will once again produce fruit that people can eat. In her first new novel since The Perfect Nanny launched her onto the world stage and won her acclaim for her "devastatingly perceptive character studies" (The New York Times Book Review), Leila Slimani draws on her own family's inspiring story for the first volume in a planned trilogy about race, resilience, and women's empowerment. Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate his family farm's rocky terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, the lack of money, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. Left increasingly alone to raise her two children in a world whose rules she does not understand, and with her daughter taunted at school by rich French girls for her secondhand clothes and unruly hair, Mathilde goes from being reduced to a farmer's wife to defying the country's chauvinism and repressive social codes by offering medical services to the rural population. As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine finds himself caught in the crossfire: in solidarity with his Moroccan workers yet also a landowner, despised by the French yet married to a Frenchwoman, and proud of his wife's resolve but ashamed by her refusal to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of others--especially the women, forced to live in the land of men--and with this novel, Leila Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation.

The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo. Living in the majority-Muslim suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, she goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy - her longest relationship. But as she gains distance from her family, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn't know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing. [Available in translation by Lara Vergnaud, The Last One]

Adeline Dieudonné is a well-known Belgian author best known for this fierce and poetic debut novel about surviving the wilderness of family life. "At home there are four bedrooms: one for her, one for her little brother Sam, one for her parents and one for the carcasses. She has won numerous literary prizes in the Francophone world including Prix du Roman FNAC, Prix Rossel, Prix Renaudot des Lycéens; Prix Goncourt-Le Choix de la Belgique, Prix des Étoiles du Parisien, Prix Première Plume and Prix Filigrane. She is also a stand-up comedian. Translation available by Roland Glasser. [Real life]

Arguably his most famous novel, this is the sequel to La Gloire de mon père. Although the vocabulary is at times difficult, the prose is accessible and less complicated than some of the classic canon of French literature.

Controversial fictionalized account of Russia under Vladimir Putin using a narrator based off of Vladislav Y. Surkov. Some argue it paints Putin's Russia in a sympathetic light that may have implications for France's foreign policy under Macron. [Wizard of the Kremlin]

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan writer. Although his first language is Darija (Maghrebi Arabic) all of his work is written in French. He was involved with running the literary magazine Souffles in the mid-1960s where he contributed many works. In 1966 after participating in student rebellions against the Moroccan police he was forced into military camp as a punishment. He later moved to Paris and began what would become a highly successful writing career. He was nominated to the Académie française but ended his campaign after a month. He is an active voice for the people of North African descent living in France. This book is set in Tangier at the beginning of the 2000s. A pedophile abuses young girls. He acts with complete impunity, without arousing the slightest suspicion. This novel tells the story of one of her victims, Samia, a sixteen-year-old girl. She does not confide in her parents, but records everything in her diary, which they will discover long after her suicide. From this tragedy, Samia's parents enter a state of disorder which will reveal their cowardice and their faults. The father, a man of integrity, joins the cohort of the corrupt. Together, they sink into mutual detestation as deep as their grief. The light will come from a young African immigrant, Viad. With gentleness and kindness, he will take care of this dying couple. Viad heals the wounds and brings back the breath of life into the house. The poor are not who they think they are. And honey can then come to soften the bitterness of those who have been cheated by fate.

Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born French author born in 1949. His native language is Arabic but he writes in French. He recieved the Prix Goncourt for his novel The Rock of Tanios as well as other awards. He was born in Beirut, the son of a staunch Maronite Catholic. He began his career writing for a daily newspaper in Beirut but moved to Paris at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and made it his permanent home. He is a member of the Académie française (taking the vacancy left by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss). He wrote a book on some of the members of the Académie who preceded him in "Un fauteuil sur la Seine". He was awarded the National Order of Merit by French President Emmanuel Macron.

An award-winning novel powerfully re-imagines a childhood in the spotlight of history, politics, and destiny. Montreal 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history. Twenty seconds on uneven bars is all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The electronic scoreboard, astonishing spectators with what has happened, shows 1.0. The judges have awarded an unprecedented perfect ten, the first in Olympic gymnastics, though the scoreboard is unable to register anything higher than 9.9. In The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, Lola Lafon tells the story of Comaneci's journey from growing up in rural Romania to her eventual defection to the United States in 1989. Adored by young girls in the west and appropriated as a political emblem by the Ceausescu regime, Comaneci's life was scrutinized wherever she went. Lafon's fictionalized account shows how a single athletic event mesmerizes the world and reverberates across nations. For French edition do an author search. [Petite communiste qui ne souriait jamais]

An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publication in 1984. Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Long unavailable in hardcover, this edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective—that of a visitor to Vietnam today. (With an introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston; translated from the French by Barbara Bray.) [Amour]

Nina (Yasmina) Bouraoui was born in 1967 in Rennes, France to an Algerian father and French mother. She is a novelist and songwriter, having written two songs for Céline Dion on the album D'elles (2007). "Mes mauvaises pensées" won the Prix Renaudot in 2005. She has written many other books, often called works of "auto-fiction" (autobiographical fiction), a term used when authors use events and people from their real lives and include them in their "fictional" writing. In particular she affirmed the influence of Marguerite Duras. In this novel one can see aspects of Hervé Guibert, Annie Ernaux, David Lynch, Eileen Gray and Violette Leduc.

Bathed in the warm clarity of the summer sun in Provence, Marcel Pagnol's childhood memories celebrate a time of rare beauty and delight. Called by Jean Renoir "the leading film artist of his age," Pagnol is best known for such films as The Baker's Wife, Harvest, Fanny, and Topaze, as well as the screen adaptations of his novels, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs (North Point, 1988). But he never forgot the magic of his Provencal childhood, and when he set his memories to paper late in life the result was a great new success. My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle appeared on the scene like a fresh breeze, captivating readers with its sweet enchantments. Pagnol recalls his days hunting and fishing in the hill country, his jaunts about Marseilles, his schoolboy diversions, and above all his family: his anticlerical father and sanctimonious uncle, his mild and beautiful mother, and many others. This bright and lively book sparkles with the charm and magic that were Marcel Pagnol's own. For French edition do an author search. [Gloire de mon père]

French edition of "Our Riches"

This debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin retraces the lives of French mathematicians over several generations through World Wars I and II. The narrative oscillates stylistically from chapter to chapter—at times a novel, fable, historical research, or a diary—locking and unlocking codes, culminating in a captivating, original reading experience. Michèle Audin is the author of several works of mathematical theory and history and also published a work on her anticolonialist father's torture, disappearance, and execution by the French during the Battle of Algiers. Christiana Hills (Translator) For French edition do an author search. [Cent vingt et un jours]

Kaouther Adimi is a writer who was born in Algeria and grew up in both France and Algeria. Nos richesses (Our Riches) celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous (in real life) Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto "by the young, for the young," discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. Our Riches interweaves Charlot's story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad is no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop's self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man's mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. Most of all, it's a hymn to the book and to the love of books. Chris Andrews (Translator)

Mavis Gallant is a Canadian who spent much of her life in Paris. She did not write in French, but she does lend a unique perspective and has an extensive body of work. She is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker for close to fifty years who has, in the words of The New York Times, "radically reshaped the short story for decade after decade." Michael Ondaatje's new selection of Gallant's work gathers some of the most memorable of her stories set in Europe and Paris, where Gallant has long lived. Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.

Virginie Grimaldi is one of the most widely-read authors in France. All of her novels have become bestsellers. She had a blog until 2018 called Femme Sweet Femme which helped her to begin writing books. Some characterize her writing as "chick lit" but she denies writing happy endings at the cost of a good story. This is one of her most popular novels. Not all of her novels are translated into English, but two popular novels are available in translation: How to Find Love in the Little Things and Chasing the Stars.

Meryem Alaoui is a Moroccan novelist who also manages an independent media group. This is her first novel, a daring portrayal of sex workers in Casablanca. Like many of the women in her working-class Casablanca neighborhood, Jmiaa struggles to earn enough money through sex work to support herself and her family—often including the deadbeat husband who walked out on her and their daughter. This daily grind is interrupted by the arrival of an aspiring young director, Chadlia. Chadlia enlists Jmiaa's help on a film project, initially just to make sure the plot and dialogue are authentic. But when she's unable to find an actress who's right for the starring role, she turns again to Jmiaa, giving the latter an incredible opportunity for a better life. For French edition do an author search [Vérité sort de la bouche du cheval]

Henri Troyat is a Russian-French novelist who is famous for his prolific career and especially his biographies of famous Russian figures including Catherine the Great, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Chekhov, Rasputin, Dostoyevsky, Ivan the Terrible, and French figures: Dumas, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Verlaine, Baudelaire and Balzac. His most well-known work is La neige en deuil which was adapted into an English-language film in 1956, The Mountain. He was the longest-serving member of the Académie française. In this definitive portrait of one of the greatest novelists of all time, Leo Tolstoy embodies the most extraordinary contradictions. He was a wealthy aristocrat who preached the virtues of poverty and the peasant life, a misogynist who wrote Anna Karenina, and a supreme writer who declared: "Literature is rubbish." Yet his titanic personality and the astonishing range of his talents and interests made him, as an author and as a strange self-proclaimed prophet, one of the undisputed literary giants of the nineteenth century. From his famously bad marriage to his enormously successful career, Troyat presents a brilliant portrait that reads like an epic novel written by Tolstoy himself. Nancy Amphoux (Translator). For French editions do an author search.

A mind-bending novel from the author of Life: A User's Manual, A Void is a great linguistic adventure and a metaphysical whodunit, chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all the while displaying Georges Perec's virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl's penchant for word games, especially for "lipograms," compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl's verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances. A book that only Georges Perec could have conceived, Time magazine called A Void, "...an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss." Gilbert Adair (Translator) For French edition do an author search. [Disparition]

Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, better know under her nom de plume, Assia Djebar, was born in 1936 and passed away in 2015. This edition of Assia Djebar's "Women of Algiers in Their Apartment", her first work to be published in English, was named by the American Literary Translators Association as an ALTA Outstanding Translation of the Year. Now available in paperback, this collection of three long stories, three short ones, and a theoretical postface by one of North Africa's leading writers depicts the plight of urban Algerian women who have thrown off the shackles of colonialism only to face a postcolonial regime that denies and subjugates them even as it celebrates the liberation of men. Denounced in Algeria for its political criticism, Djebar's book quickly sold out its first printing of 15,000 copies in France and was hugely popular in Italy. Her stylistically innovative, lyrical stories address the cloistering of women, the implications of reticence, the connection of language to oppression, and the impact of war on both women and men. The Afterword by Clarisse Zimra includes an illuminating interview with Djebar. Marjolijn de Jager (Translator); Clarisse Zimra (Translator) For French edition do an author search. [Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement]