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by Abdellah Taïa
A story in praise of a woman, a fighter, a survivor from the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist known for humanizing North Africa's otherwise marginalized characters—prostitutes and thieves, trans and gay people in a world where being LGBTQ+ can be a dangerous act.
Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman. From 1954 to 1999. From French colonization to the death of King Hassan II.
It is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa's stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taia's last novel, A Country for Dying.
Malika's first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina.
In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman's villa.
The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her.
Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of History. To survive. To have a little space of her own.
Malika is Taïa's mother: M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.
"With magnificent precision and gorgeous, understated lyricism, Taia homes in on three events in Malika's life that, taken together, contain the historical sweep of her life and her country. This is unforgettable." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Taïa's wonderfully ferocious and contradictory heroine Malika will make you weep and quail by turn. Her testament is a powerful antidote to the sentimentality and exoticism that so often distorts depictions of Arab womanhood." —Zoë Heller, author of Everything You Know
This information about Living in Your Light 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.
Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1973, Abdellah Taia has written many novels, including Salvation Army, which he also made into an award-winning film, Infidels (Seven Stories 2016), translated by Alison Strayer, and A Country for Dying (Seven Stories, 2020), which was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Emma Ramadan's translation. He lives in Paris.
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