From Morocco to the Sudan, North Africa is a vibrant region rich in history, turmoil and reinvention. Here is our selection of the 10 Best North African Books to Read!
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10 Best North African Books to Read
The Bleeding of the Stone by Ibrahim al-Koni
For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri
The Granada Trilogy by Radwa Ashour
Children of the New World by Assia Djebar
Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali
The Palm House by Tarek Eltayeb
My Friends by Hisham Matar
Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.
Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.
The Bleeding of the Stone by Ibrahim al-Koni
The moufflon, a wild sheep prized for its meat, continues to survive in the remote mountain desert of southern Libya. Only Asouf, a lone bedouin who cherishes the desert and identifies with its creatures, knows exactly where it is to be found. Now he and the moufflon together come under threat from hunters who have already slaughtered the once numerous desert gazelles. The novel combines pertinent ecological issues with a moving portrayal of traditional desert life and of the power of the human spirit to resist.
For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri
Driven by famine from their home in the Rif, Mohamed’s family walks to Tangiers in search of a better life. But things are no better there. Eight of Mohamed’s siblings die of malnutrition and neglect, and one is killed by Mohamed’s father in a fit of rage. On moving to another province Mohamed learns how to charm and steal, and discovers the joys of drugs, sex and alcohol.
Proud, insolent and afraid of no-one, Mohamed returns to Tangiers, where he is caught up in the violence of the 1952 independence riots. During a short spell in a filthy Moroccan jail, a fellow inmate kindles Mohamed’s life-altering love of literature. A cult classic, For Bread Alone is an astonishing tale of human resilience and an unflinching and searing portrait of the early life of one of the Arab world’s most important and widely read authors.
The Granada Trilogy by Radwa Ashour
It is 1492, and the keys to Granada, the last Muslim state in the Spanish Peninsula, have been handed over to the Christian king and queen: the final vestiges of this Arab kingdom in Europe are swept away.
As the triumphant new masters of Granada burn books, Abu Jaafar, a bookseller by trade, quietly moves his rich library out of town, while preparing for the marriage of his granddaughter Saleema to his apprentice Saad. The tangled lives of Abu Jaafar’s family, his descendants, and his community bear witness to the vanquishing of Muslim life: confiscations, forced conversions, and expulsions.
Radwa Ashour’s sweeping trilogy, set over one hundred years against the backdrop of the great historical events of sixteenth-century Europe, tells the story of those who remained in Andalusia, of the individuals who struggled to maintain faith and hope in a possible future. It narrates a community’s effort to comprehend what has happened to them, of their valiant but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to resist the destruction of their identity.
Children of the New World by Assia Djebar
Centering women in political resistance, Children of the New World follows a robust cast of women in a rural Algerian town who find themselves joined in solidarity as they empower one another to engage in the fight for independence. Narrating the resistance movement across a variety of perspectives—from traditional wives to liberated students to political organizers—Djebar powerfully depicts the circumstances that drive oppressed communities to violence while she movingly reveals the tragic costs of war.
Children of the New World was written following the author’s own involvement in the Algerian resistance to colonial French rule, making it both intensely personal and deeply resonant.
Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali
Behind the bar at Jameel’s in Cairo hang two mugs engraved with the names of Ram and Font. During their years together in London, they drank many a pint of Bass from these mugs. But there is no Bass in Nasser’s Egypt, so Ram and Font have to make do with a heady mixture of beer, vodka and whisky. Yearning for Bass they long to be far from a revolution that neither serves the people nor allows their rich aunts to live the life of leisure they are accustomed to.
Stranded between two cultures, Ram and Font must choose between dangerous political opposition and reluctant acquiescence.
Nedjma by Kateb Yassine
Nedjma is a masterpiece of North African writing. Its intricate plot involves four men in love with the beautiful woman whose name serves as the title of the novel. Nedjma is the central figure of this disorienting novel, but more than the unfortunate wife of a man she does not love, more than the unwilling cause of rivalry among many suitors, Nedjma is the symbol of Algeria.
Kateb has crafted a novel that is the saga of the founding ancestors of Algeria through the conquest of Numidia by the Romans, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, and French colonial conquest. Nedjma is symbolic of the rich and sometimes bloody past of Algeria, of its passions, of its tenderness; it is the epic story of a human quest for freedom and happiness.
The Palm House by Tarek Eltayeb
After coming to Vienna from Sudan to win a better life for himself, Hamza struggles to escape from the margins of society and the stigma of the immigrant. Following several years of hardship, his fortunes begin to change when he meets Sandra, a young Austrian woman, who shows him the Palm House. In this famous Viennese greenhouse, the frost of Hamza’s heart begins to thaw, and he slowly opens himself to Sandra, revealing his bitter yet beautiful past in Sudan and beyond.
This masterful novel draws on the 1001 Nights as well as Sudanese folk traditions, and demonstrates the remarkable power of storytelling to overcome even the most dire circumstances.
The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami
In 1527, hundreds of settlers arrived on the coast of modern-day Florida and claimed the region for Spain. Within a year of navigational errors, disease, starvation and fierce resistance from indigenous tribes, only four survivors remained. Three were nobleman, whose stories found their way into the official record. The fourth was known only as Estebanico, a vibrant merchant from Barbary forced into slavery and a new name, reborn as the first African explorer of the Americas.
This is his story: a journey across the great swathes of the New World, where would-be conquerors are transformed into humble servants, fearful outcasts into healers, and the silenced into storytellers.
Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
A sweeping and evocative portrait of both a family and a country struggling to move toward independence in a society that has resisted change for centuries. Set against the backdrop of Britain’s occupation of Egypt immediately after World War I, Palace Walk introduces us to the Al Jawad family.
Ahmad, a middle-class shopkeeper runs his household strictly according to the Qur’an while at night he explores the pleasures of Cairo. A tyrant at home, Ahmad forces his gentle, oppressed wife and two daughters to live cloistered lives behind the house’s latticed windows, while his three very different sons live in fear of his harsh will.
The first book of the classic Cairo Trilogy, the greatest and best loved work by the 20th century’s most important Arab novelist.
If you enjoyed 10 Best North African Books to Read, check out Top 10 Modern Middle Eastern Books to Read