The first novel available to English readers by Fawzia Zouari, one of the most important North African authors writing today, begins with an emergency crew's arrival at a Parisian apartment. Two emaciated young women, sisters, are brought out on stretchers. To the crowd of onlookers the women's condition is mystifying; for the two sisters, this is the inescapable end to a tragic series of events. Inspired by an actual news story from the French headlines, I Die by This Country introduces us to Nacera and Amira. Casting her mind back in the midst of the opening pages' upheaval, Nacera pieces together her fragmentary knowledge of her parents' lives in rural French Algeria and their immigration to Paris in the years following Algeria's war for independence. Her memories of how both she and Amira struggled to find their place as children of immigrants reveals the enormous stress of social exclusion and identity conflicts facing immigrant youth. Nacera and her family yearn for acceptance, but the reader sees this dream becoming increasingly unattainable. Zouari's frank prose and penetrating storytelling deftly relates the multigenerational experience of Franco-Algerian immigration during the last quarter of the twentieth century. As France continues, like so many western countries, to struggle with questions regarding national identity, immigration, and its colonial past, the experiences depicted in this novel resonate more than ever.

The first novel available to English readers by Fawzia Zouari, one of the most important North African authors writing today, begins with an emergency crew's arrival at a Parisian apartment. Two emaciated young women, sisters, are brought out on stretchers. To the crowd of onlookers the women's condition is mystifying; for the two sisters, this is the inescapable end to a tragic series of events. Inspired by an actual news story from the French headlines, I Die by This Country introduces us to Nacera and Amira. Casting her mind back in the midst of the opening pages' upheaval, Nacera pieces together her fragmentary knowledge of her parents' lives in rural French Algeria and their immigration to Paris in the years following Algeria's war for independence. Her memories of how both she and Amira struggled to find their place as children of immigrants reveals the enormous stress of social exclusion and identity conflicts facing immigrant youth. Nacera and her family yearn for acceptance, but the reader sees this dream becoming increasingly unattainable. Zouari's frank prose and penetrating storytelling deftly relates the multigenerational experience of Franco-Algerian immigration during the last quarter of the twentieth century. As France continues, like so many western countries, to struggle with questions regarding national identity, immigration, and its colonial past, the experiences depicted in this novel resonate more than ever.

The celebrated and highly versatile writer Leila Sebbar was born in French colonial Algeria but has lived nearly her entire adult life in France, where she is recognized as a major voice on the penetrating effects of colonialism in contemporary society. The dramatic contrast between her past and present is the subject of the nine autobiographical essays collected in this volume. Written between 1978 and 2006, they trace a journey that began in Aflou, Algeria, where her father ran a schoolhouse, and continued to France, where Sebbar traveled, alone, as a graduate student before eventually realizing her powerful creative vision. The pieces collected in this book capture an array of experiences, sensations, and sentiments surrounding the French colonial presence in Algeria and offer an intimate and prismatic reflection on Sebbar's bicultural upbringing as the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Sebbar offers an unflinching portrait of her original disconnection from her father's Arabic language and culture; she goes on to describe her struggle to revive a cultural heritage that her family had deliberately obscured and translate into French the vibrant yet muted Arabic of her father and of Algeria. Looking back from numerous vantage points throughout her life, she presents the complicated and divisive dynamics of being raised ""between two shores""--the colonized and the colonizer.