-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A tour de force: an utterly singular modern Moroccan classic.
"When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive…" So begins Ahmed Bouanani's arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani's own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator's consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital's iron gate disappears.
Like Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl, the works of Franz Kafka - or perhaps like Mann's The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder - The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.
"The layers of metaphor and surreal imagery create a atmospheric, unresolved tension for fans of compressed, unsettling narratives." - Publishers Weekly
"A puzzling but haunting novel." - Kirkus
This information about The Hospital was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011) was a writer, poet, illustrator, filmmaker, and an important figure in the Moroccan literary and artistic scene. His novel The Hospital, was first published in 1990 and fell into obscurity until it was republished in France in 2012 to great critical acclaim.
If you liked The Hospital, try these:
by Olga Tokarczuk
Published 2025
The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.
by Garth Greenwell
Published 2025
A medical crisis brings one man close to death―and to love, art, and beauty―in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.
by Daniel Mason
Published 2019
By the international bestselling author of The Piano Tuner, a sweeping and unforgettable love story of a young doctor and nurse at a remote field hospital in the First World War.
L.A. Women by Ella Berman
Two ambitious writers in 1960s LA face betrayal when one writes a novel based on the other's life.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
