Terrorism Explained to Our Kids, takes the form of a dialogue between the author and his teenage daughter. Using her ill-defined fears as the starting point, Exploring all forms of terrorism in both a historical and contemporary context, the book addresses complex and pressing questions in an everyday, accessible language. Because Ben Jelloun understands that terrorist acts come from the perpetrators' deep sense of inadequacy, his arguments are all the more powerful. The author, himself a Muslim, places a high value on the importance of secular values, with which he believes Islam is compatible.

In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary Arab social customs and Islamic law. "The Sand Child" tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies. As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, "The Sand Child" has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction.

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.

Acclaimed novelist, Ben Jelloun clarifies the main tenets of Islam, the major landmarks in Islamic history, and the current politics of Islamic fundamentalism. He also sheds light on the keywords that have come to dominate coverage of the current crisis - terrorist, crusade, Jihad, fundamentalist, fatwa - offering lucid and balanced explanations, not only for youngsters but also for the general reader. In his landmark Racism Explained to My Daughter, which Elle magazine described as a must read...clear, powerful, and right on target, celebrated North African novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun offered a powerful model for teaching difficult subjects to our children. Now, in Islam Explained, Ben Jelloun brings these same insights to bear on understanding Islam in the wake of September 11. In an accessible question-and-answer format, Islam Explained is at once an essential introduction to one of the world's great religions and a cry for tolerance and understanding in deeply troubled times. For general readers on foreign religions and particularly Islam (given the recent success of titles by Bernard Lewis, Karen Armstrong, and Ahmed Rashid), but especially adult readers looking to answer chi

In this extraordinary non-fiction novel, based on a true story, Tahar Ben Jelloun traces the experiences of Salim who, in 1971, took part in a failed coup attempt to oust King Hassan II of Morocco. With sixty others Salim was incarcerated in a secret prison complex in the Moroccan desert: he was to remain there for nearly twenty years.;In starkly eloquent, beautiful prose, Ben Jelloun relates the prisoners' experiences as they struggle to survive. The son of a witty, feckless courtier who disowns him, Salim tells stories to keep sane from the suras of his beloved Koran to the plot of A Streetcar Named Desire. Even in the darkest, most terrible conditions, sympathy, insight, the human quest for meaning and understanding, never desert Salim. The resulting novel is a wrenching yet exquisite celebration of the human spirit and its determination to survive.;A masterpiece' Judges of the IMPAC award;'a sad and splendid book' New York Times Book Review

From "Morocco's greatest living author" (The Guardian), an internationally bestselling novel of universal appeal-about the powerful pull of home and the lengths to which a parent will go to bring his family together Mohammed has spent the past forty years working in France. As he approaches retirement, he takes stock of his life-his devotion to Islam and to his assimilated children-and decides to return to Morocco, where he spends his life's savings building the biggest house in the village and waiting for his children and grandchildren to come be with him. A heartbreaking novel about parents and children, A Palace in the Old Village captures the sometimes stark contrasts between old- and new-world values, and immigrant's abiding pursuit of home.

Renowned for his compeling, humane portraits of everyday Arab lives, Tahar Ben Jelloun has affirmed his place in the literary world by winning such awards as the Prix Goncourt and Prix Maghreb. In "The Last Friend," Ben Jelloun presents a spellbinding coming-of-age story and a dazzling portrait of Morocco in an era of repression and disillusionment. In Tangiers in the late 1950s, two teenagers, Mamed and Ali, strike up an intense friendship that will last a lifetime. But lurking just beneath the surface is a deep, unspoken jealousy in danger of destroying them both.

From one of the world's great writers, a novel that mirrors the journeys of millions who leave home for a better life In Leaving Tangier, award-winning, internationally bestselling author Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of a Moroccan brother and sister making new lives for themselves in Spain. Azel is a young man in Tangier who dreams of crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. When he meets Miguel, a wealthy Spaniard, he leaves behind his girlfriend, his sister, Kenza, and his mother, and moves with him to Barcelona, where Kenza eventually joins them. What they find there forms the heart of this novel of seduction and betrayal, deception and disillusionment, in which Azel and Kenza are reminded powerfully not only of where they've come from, but also of who they really are.

An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France and winner of the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, This Blinding Absence of Light is the latest work by Tahar Ben Jelloun, the first North African winner of the Prix Goncourt and winner of the 1994 Prix Mahgreb. Ben Jelloun crafts a horrific real-life narrative into fiction to tell the appalling story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies under the most harrowing conditions. Not until September 1991, under international pressure, was Hassan's regime forced to open these desert hellholes. A handful of survivors—living cadavers who had shrunk by over a foot in height—emerged from the six-by-three-foot cells in which they had been held underground for decades. Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben Jelloun eschewed the traditional novel format and wrote a book in the simplest of language, reaching always for the most basic of words, the most correct descriptions. The result is a shocking novel that explores both the limitlessness of inhumanity and the impossible endurance of the human will.

The award-winning novelist and author of the international bestseller "Racism Explained to My Daughter" uses his own experience to illuminate the experience of the Other in his adopted land -- and everywhere. A Moroccan who emigrated to France in 1971, Tahar Ben Jelloun draws upon his own encounters with racism along with his insights as a practicing psychologist and gifted novelist to elucidate the racial divisions that plague contemporary society. In a modern France where openly racist leaders such as National Front spokesman Jean-Marie Le Pen have made significant strides toward broad popular acceptance, Ben Jelloun's book is more topical now than ever. His profound and compelling appeal for tolerance -- in both public discourse and the law -- is a passionate yet reasoned argument that racism simply does not make sense in the multicultural world of today.

"French Hospitality" confronts issues of international resonance: the relationship of a formerly colonized people to their onetime colonizers, the encounter between Islam and the modern Judeo-Christian West, and the status of the non-European minorities in Europe today. Underlying these issues is a heartfelt nostalgia for simple, traditional North African hospitality as practiced since time immemorial by a relatively poor and unsophisticated society. Ben Jelloun supplements this rather noble ideal of generosity and welcoming by borrowing the philosophical concept of hospitality -- the opening of oneself to another -- from the works of Emmanuel L?vinas and Jacques Derrida in order to illustrate the moral conception of a nation's unconditional acceptance of foreigners. Isn't the belief in welcoming strangers a fundamental mark of civilization? In a political climate where increasingly repressive immigration laws are a national trend as well as an international phenomenon, he contends, it is not surprising that racism has gained a foothold. Most hurt by racist polemic and politics, he points out, are children of immigrants -- born in France, their memories are those of the French people, and they deserve to be treated with the full respect afforded to any citizen.

With his elegant and imaginative prose, Ben Jelloun shows us both racism's face and the immigrant's heartbreak; but he also evokes the wind of freedom and the ideal of hospitality, and with this gesture offers a kind of hope in extricating ourselves from racism's recidivist incoherencies.

Casablanca and Tangier provide the backdrops for Corruption, an exotic and erotic tale of modern-day morality, reminiscent of Camus's The Stranger. Mourad is the last honest man in Morocco. Much to the chagrin of his boss, his colleagues, and his materialistic wife, he adamantly refuses to accept "commissions" for his work. But his honesty goes unappreciated. Criticized for condemning his family to a life of poverty, encouraged by his boss to be more "flexible", Mourad finally gives in: just one envelope stuffed with cash, then another... Ben Jelloun's compelling novel evokes the universal dangers of succumbing to the daily temptations of modern life, as Mourad lives the consequences of betraying his own conscience after a lifetime of honesty and resistance.