Living in Your Light
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
A story in praise of a woman, a fighter, a survivor from the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist known for humanizing North Africa’s otherwise marginalized characters—prostitutes and thieves, trans and gay people in a world where being LGBTQ+ can be a dangerous act.
Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.
A Green Apple bookstore March 2025 Apple-a-Month Pick.
Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman. From 1954 to 1999. From French colonization to the death of King Hassan II.
It is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taia’s last novel, A Country for Dying.
Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina.
In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa.
The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her.
Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of History. To survive. To have a little space of her own.
Malika is Taïa’s mother: M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An illiterate woman from the Moroccan countryside recounts her life in Taia's hypnotic and masterful latest (after A Country for Dying). The novel opens in the 1950s with the narrator, 17-year-old Malika, falling in love with Allal, a man with a male lover named Merzougue. After Malika and Allal marry, he leaves with the French colonial army to fight in Indochina. She and Merzougue soon learn of his death in combat, and Taia stages a touching scene in which the pair pantomime the burial of Allal's unrecovered body in the mausoleum where Allal and Merzougue used to meet to make love. In the novel's second section, a 30-something Malika, now remarried, faces the possibility of a new loss: a white woman from France named Monique wants Malika's oldest daughter Khadija to be her live-in maid. As Malika faces off against Monique, she confronts the ways in which, even after Morocco's independence, the French are "still here, very much so." The final section depicts an elderly Malika confronting a thief in her home, a young gay man from her neighborhood named Jaâfar, who wishes to be sent back to prison to reunite with his lover. Jaâfar was also friends with Ahmed, Malika's gay son who cut off contact with her after he immigrated to Paris. With magnificent precision and gorgeous, understated lyricism, Taia homes in on three events in Malika's life that, taken together, contain the historical sweep of her life and her country. This is unforgettable.
