![]() It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future. Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Taïa writes, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira. Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan. Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona. With terse, biting prose beautifully translated from French by Emma Ramadan, it is a startlingly topical. Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her. A POCKETABLE, one-sitting read, Abdellah Taa’s A Country for Dying is an engrossing transcontinental and transgenerational fable sweeping from coastal Morocco to northern France over the course of five decades (see WLT, Sept. An exquisite novel of North Africans in Paris by "one of the most original and necessary voices in world literature" ![]()
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