"This charming, vivid and poetic book captures the poignancy of immigrant life and all the unresolved pain of Africa's relationship with its former colonial powers."--Michela Wrong

Salie lives in Paris. Back home on the Senegalese island of Niodior, her football-crazy brother Madicke counts on her to get him to France, the promised land where foreign footballers become world famous. The story of Salie and Madicke highlights the painful situation of those who emigrate. It is a moving account of one of the great tragedies of our time.

"Morocco's greatest living author." The Guardian UK

"A writer of social and moral acuteness." Los Angeles Times

"A writer of much originality." The Chicago Tribune

Lalla Fatma believes she is in Fez in 1944 where she grew up not in Tangier in 2000, where the story begins.

Guided by her fragmented memories, Ben Jelloun reimagines his mother's life in Fez at the end of the war, in the heavily ritualised world of custom and tradition that saw her married, pregnant, and widowed by sixteen. He gains privileged, painful access to her lives as...