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by J. M. G. Le Clézio
A masterpiece from J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The parallel stories of a lost culture in the North African desert and their descendants, unwanted immigrants in Europe.
Desert is two stories. The first takes place between 1909 and 1912 and is about the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the Blue Men. They are warriors of the desert. Driven from their lands by French colonial soldiers, Nour's tribe has come to the valley of the Saguiet El Hamra to seek the aid of the great spiritual leader known as Water of the Eyes. The religious chief sends them out from the holy city of Smara into the desert to travel still further. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, and suffering, Nour's tribe and others flee northward in the hopes of finding a land that can harbor them at last.
The second narrative tells the contemporary story of Lalla, a descendant of the Blue Men. An orphan living in a shantytown known as the Project near a coastal city in Morocco, Lalla must flee to France where even greater challenges await her.
This is world literature at its most powerful from a master storyteller.
"In scenes of shimmering intensity, Le Clézio contrasts nature's stark and majestic clarity, from scouring sand to the incinerating sun and the vast gleaming net of stars, with the chaos, toxicity, and injustice of human life. A long time coming for English-language readers, Le Clézio's incandescent masterpiece couldn't be more relevant." ―Booklist
"Le Clézio's vision is cinematic, his language lyrical and the lives he portrays are vivid and convincing." ―Publishers Weekly
This information about Desert 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.
Awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, J. M. G. Le Clézio is a French-Mauritian author of over forty works. The Nobel Prize committee described him as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
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