In 1980s Casablanca, Farah arrives from her small town life with big dreams: she wants to sing. She meets Outhman, but he longs to leave the city, to seek his fortune elsewhere. They fall in love, but trouble brews on the horizon. A bitter struggle rages over construction of the monumental Hassan II Mosque-it will destroy their neighborhood but the government insist this is a necessary sacrifice for the good of Morocco. The two young lovers find themselves caught up in events beyond their control, and in a world that seems to work against their happiness at every turn. A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me is a narrative tour de force: one of power plays and petty jealousies, deceit and corruption, written with masterful attention to detail.

It's spring 1990 in a dingy small-town Moroccan bar. Zina is serving drinks when a mysterious man approaches her. The man gives Zina a handwritten note from her husband, Aziz, who disappeared the day after their wedding, eighteen years ago, after participating in the failed 1972 coup against King Hassan II. Zina has spent the past eighteen years searching for Aziz, who has been imprisoned in inhuman conditions in a solitary cell inside a secret desert jail. Will Zina finally find Aziz? Moving back and forth between 1990 and the past, A Rare Blue Bird That Flies with Me recounts the painful circumstances that brought Zina and Aziz together and the torture after the 1972 coup that tore them apart. Told from the perspective of several narrators-including Zina, Aziz, Aziz's two jailors-Youssef Fadel's novel is a masterful history of modern Morocco.