J.M.G.Le Clézio

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The international bestseller, by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2008, available for the first time in English translation.
Young Nour is a North African desert tribesman. It is 1909, and as the First World War looms Nour's tribe — the Blue Men — are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward, in the hope of finding a land in which they can again be free.
Decades later, an orphaned descendant of the Blue Men — a girl called Lalla — is living in a shantytown on the coast of Morocco. Lalla has inherited both the pride and the resilience of her tribe — and she will need them, as she makes a bid to escape her forced marriage to a wealthy older man. She flees to Marseilles, where she experiences both the hardships of immigrant life — as a hotel maid — and the material prosperity of those who succeed — when she becomes a successful model. And yet Lalla does not betray the legacy of her ancestors.
In these two narratives set in counterpoint, Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio tells — powerfully and movingly — the story of the 'last free men' and of Europe's colonial legacy — a story of war and exile and of the endurance of the human spirit.
This book is currently unavailable
415 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2010
Publication year
2010
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Quotes

  • Diep Nguyenhas quoted4 years ago
    From the first minute of their lives, the men belonged to the boundless open spaces, to the sand, to the thistles, the snakes, the rats, and especially to the wind, for that was their true family. The little girls with copper hair grew up, learned the endless motions of life. They had no mirror other than the fascinating stretches of gypsum plains under the pure blue sky. The boys learned to walk, talk, hunt, and fight simply to learn how to die on the sand.

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