Desert
In 1909 the boy Nour walks north with the blue-veiled caravans of the Saharan tribes, gathering behind a sheikh toward a promised ground and away from the French columns closing on it. Two generations later Lalla grows up in a shantytown outside a Moroccan port on the stories of those ancestors, and is sent to Marseille, where the light, the work and the crowds run to a different order altogether. The Swedish Academy named it his breakthrough as a novelist, and it took the Grand Prix Paul Morand in the year it appeared.
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Attributes
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 61% · 14 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 49% · 13 shared
- 49% · 10 shared
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- 46% · 11 shared