Desert
The international bestseller, by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2008, available for the first time in English translation. Hailed by the Swedish Academy as Le Clézio s definitive breakthrough as a novelist , Desert is an epic novel that spans the twentieth century and ranges across two continents, from the North African desert to the streets of Marseilles. 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.