Longlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize Since she's been ill, Lalla Fatma has become a frail little thing with a faltering memory. Lalla Fatma thinks she's in Fez in 1944, where she grew up, not in Tangier in 2000, where this story begins. She calls out to family members who are long dead and loses herself in the streets of her childhood, yearning for her first love and the city she left behind. By her bedside, her son Tahar listens to long-hidden secrets and stories from her past: married while still playing with dolls and widowed for the first time at the age of sixteen. Guided by these fragments, Tahar vividly conjures his mother's life in post-war Morocco, unravelling the story of a woman for whom resignation was the only way out. Tender and compelling, About My Mother maps the beautiful, fragile and complex nature of human experience, while paying tribute to a remarkable woman and the bond between mother and son.

Salie lives in Paris. Back home on the Senegalese Island of Niodior, her football-crazy brother, Madicke, counts on her to get him to France, the promised land where foreign footballers become world famous. Given his illusions, how can Salie explain to him the grim reality of life as an immigrant? The story of Salie and Madicke highlights the painful situation of those who emigrate. Others who feel this pain include Ndetare, the Marxist schoolteacher and football coach, exiled to Niodior by the government but never accepted by those born there. Then there's Sankele, his former lover, the legendary beauty, whose only way out of an arranged marriage ends in tragedy. And poor Moussa, whose dreams look set to come true when he's scouted by a big French football club, but which fall apart when he doesn't make the team.