Harraga. The term means "to burn," and it refers to those Algerians in exile, who burn their identity papers to seek asylum in Europe. But for Boualem Sansal, whose novels are banned in his own country, there is a kind of internal exile even for those who stay; and for no one is it worse than for the country's women. Lamia is thirty-five years old, a doctor. Having lost most of her family, she is accustomed to living alone, unmarried and contentedly independent when a teenage girl, Chérifa, arrives on her doorstep. Chérifa is pregnant by Lamia's brother in exile — Lamia's first indication since he left that he is alive — and she'll surely be killed if she returns to her parents. Lamia grudgingly offers her hospitality; Chérifa ungratefully accepts it. But she is restless and obstinate, and before long she runs away, out into the hostile streets — leaving Lamia to track her, fearing for the life of the girl she has come, improbably, to love as family. Boualem Sansal creates, in Lamia, an incredible narrator: cultured, caustic, and compassionate, with an ironic contempt for the government, she is utterly convincing. With his deceptively simple story, Sansal delivers a brave indictment of fundamentalism that is also warm and wonderfully humane

Based on a true story and inspired by the work of Primo Levi, The German Mujahid is a heartfelt reflection on guilt and the harsh imperatives of history. The two brothers Schiller, Rachel and Malrich, couldn't be more dissimilar. They were born in a small village in Algeria to a German father and an Algerian mother, and raised by an elderly uncle in one of the toughest ghettos in France. But there the similarities end. Rachel is a model immigrant — hard working, upstanding, law-abiding. Malrich has drifted. Increasingly alienated and angry, his future seems certain: incarceration at best. Then Islamic fundamentalists murder the young men's parents in Algeria and the event transforms the destinies of both brothers in unexpected ways. Rachel discovers the shocking truth about his family and buckles under the weight of the sins of his father, a former SS officer. Now Malrich, the outcast, will have to face that same awful truth alone. Banned in the author's native Algeria for of the frankness with which it confronts several explosive themes, The German Mujahid is a truly groundbreaking novel. For the first time, an Arab author directly addresses the moral implications of the Shoah. But this richly plotted novel also leaves its author room enough to address other equally controversial issues; Islamic fundamentalism and Algeria's "dirty war" of the early 1990s, for example or the emergence of grim Muslim ghettos in France's low-income housing projects. In this gripping novel, Boualem Sansal confronts these and other explosive questions with unprecedented sincerity and courage