Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.

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.

I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity....
--An Arab Melancholia

Sal , near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood--which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco.

Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Ta a's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Sal , to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.

The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless--a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match--the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.

WINNER OF THE 2021 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE

Paris, Summer 2010.

Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her.
Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona.
Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan.
Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira.

Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Taïa writes, So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future.

The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless--a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match--the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.

An autobiographical novel by turn na ve and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Ta a is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Ta a's life with complete disclosure--from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Sal , through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer's attraction to his eldest brother, to a disappointing arrival in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood. In so doing, Salvation Army manages to burn through the author's first-person singularity to embody the complex m lange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture. Recently hailed by his native country's press as the first Moroccan to have the courage to publicly assert his difference, Ta a, through his calmly transgressive work, has outed himself as the only gay man in a country whose theocratic law still declares homosexuality a crime. The persistence of prejudices on all sides of the Mediterranean and Atlantic makes the translation of Ta a's work both a literary and political event. The arrival of Salvation Army (published in French in 2006) in English will be welcomed by an American audience already familiar with a growing cadre of talented Arab writers working in French (including Muhammad Dib, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Katib Yasin).

Tangier is a possessed city, haunted by spirits of different faiths. When we have literature in our blood, in our souls, it's impossible not to be visited by them.
--from Another Morocco

In 2006, Abdellah Ta a returned to his native Morocco to promote the Moroccan release of his second book, Le rouge du tarbouche (The Red of the Fez). During this book tour, he was interviewed by a reporter for the French-Arab journal Tel Quel, who was intrigued by the themes of homosexuality she saw in his writing. Ta a, who had not publically come out and feared the repercussions for himself and his family of doing so in a country where homosexuality continues to be outlawed, nevertheless consented to the interview and subsequent profile, Homosexuel envers et contre tous (Homosexual against All Odds). This interview made him the first openly gay writer to be published in Morocco.

Another Morocco collects short stories from Ta a's first two books, Mon Maroc (My Morocco) and Le rouge du tarbouche, both published before this pivotal moment. In these stories, we see a young writer testing the porousness of boundaries, flirting with strategies of revelation and concealment. These are tales of life in a working-class Moroccan family, of a maturing writer's fraught relationship with language and community, and of the many cities and works that have inspired him.

With a reverence for the subaltern--for the strength of women and the disenfranchised--these stories speak of humanity and the construction of the self against forces that would invalidate its very existence. Ta a's work is, necessarily, a political gesture.