Assia Djebar, one of the most distinguished woman writers to emerge from the Arab world, wrote Children of the New World following her own involvement in the Algerian resistance to colonial French rule. Like the classic film The Battle of Algiers—enjoyi
So Vast the Prison is the double-threaded story of a modern, educated Algerian woman existing in a man's society, and, not surprisingly, living a life of contradictions. Djebar, too, tackles cross-cultural issues just by writing in French of an Arab socie
In this stunning novel, Assia Djebar intertwines the history of her native Algeria with episodes from the life of a young girl in a story stretching from the French conquest in 1830 to the War of Liberation of the 1950s. The girl, growing up in the old Ro
Isma and Hajila are both wives of the same man, but they are not rivals.Isma - older, vibrant, passionate, emancipated - is in stark contrast to the passive, cloistered Hajila. In alternating chapters, Isma tells her own story in the first person, and the
This elegantly haunting work of fiction features bookstore owner Boualem Yekker, who lives in a country overtaken by a radically conservative party known as the Vigilant Brothers, a group that seeks to control every aspect of life according to the precept
In a prison cell two women meet, thrown together by injustice and violence. One is labelled mad, the other a counterfeiter. One is of French-Jewish origin, the other African. One is old, the other young. Yet they are both hoping for love and as prison lif
In 2011, Annick Cojean, senior reporter at Le Monde and special correspondent for Tripoli, wrote a shock article, titled 'Gaddafi's sexual slave', which told the story of Soraya, a twenty-two-year old Libyan woman who had been kidnapped and held captive s
Raised on Charles Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux in 1970s Lebanon, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. As the bombs fell, she lived an adolescence of excess and transgression, defying death
In 1941, Theo Coster was a student at the Amsterdam Jewish Lyceum, one in a class of 28 Jewish children that the Nazis had segregated from the rest of the Dutch population. Among Theo's fellow students was a young Anne Frank, whose diary would later becom
