Tahar Ben Jelloun Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Sand Child (1987)
  2. Solitaire (1988)
  3. Sacred Night (1989)
  4. Silent Day in Tangiers (1991)
  5. With Downcast Eyes (1993)
  6. State of Absence (1994)
  7. Corruption (1995)
  8. This Blinding Absence of Light (2002)
  9. The Grapes of Despair (2002)
  10. The Last Friend (2005)
  11. Leaving Tangier (2009)
  12. A Palace in the Old Village (2011)
  13. The Happy Marriage (2016)
  14. By Fire (2016)
  15. About My Mother (2016)
  16. The Punishment (2020)
  17. The Pleasure Marriage (2021)

Collections

Non fiction

  1. Racism Explained to My Daughter (1999)
  2. French Hospitality (1999)
  3. Islam Explained (2002)
  4. On Terrorism (2020)

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Tahar Ben Jelloun Books Overview

The Sand Child

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.

Sacred Night

The Sacred Night continues the remarkable story Tahar Ben Jelloun began in The Sand Child. Mohammed Ahmed, a Moroccan girl raised as a boy in order to circumvent Islamic inheritance laws regarding female children, remains deeply conflicted about her identity. In a narrative that shifts in and out of reality moving between a mysterious present and a painful past, Ben Jelloun relates the events of Ahmed’s adult life. Now calling herself Zahra, she renounces her role as only son and heir after her father’s death and journeys through a dreamlike Moroccan landscape. A searing allegorical portrait of North African society, The Sacred Night uses Arabic fairy tales and surrealist elements to craft a stunning and disturbing vision of protest and rebellion against the strictures of hidebound traditions governing gender roles and sexuality.

Corruption

Winner of the Prix Goncourt and the 1994 Prix Maghreb, Tahar Ben Jelloun is one of the most acclaimed novelists writing in French today. Casablanca and Tangier provide the backdrops for Corruption, an exotic and erotic tale of modern day morality about Mourad, the last honest man in Morocco. After a lifetime of resistance, Mourad finally gives in to the demands of his materialistic wife and accepts ‘commissions’ for his work: just one envelope stuffed with cash, then another…

This Blinding Absence of Light

A shocking story set in Morocco’s desert concentration camps, from the Prix Goncourt winning novelist. An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France, This Blinding Absence of Light is Tahar Ben Jelloun’s crafting of a horrific real life narrative into a work of fiction. ‘In this deeply moving novel,’ says L’Express, ‘Tahar Ben Jelloun has chosen imagination as the response to inhumanity the art of writing as the ultimate liberation.’ He tells the appalling story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies. 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 great novel,’ according to Le Monde, and what Les chos calls ‘a book of universal import, addressing all the horrors, past and doubtless future, that man has inflicted on his fellow men.’

The Last Friend

From the winner of the 2004 Impac Prize, a classic story of friendship and betrayal. The Last Friend, the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Tahar Ben Jelloun, winner of the 2004 International Dublin/IMPAC award, is a Rashamon like tale of friendship and betrayal set in twentieth century Tangier. Written in Ben Jelloun’s inimitable and powerfully direct style, the novel explores the twists and turns of an intense thirty year friendship between two young men struggling to find their identities and sexual fulfillment in Morocco in the late 1950s, a complex and contradictory society both modern and archaic. From their carefree university days through their brutal imprisonment and ultimate release, the two rely on each other for physical and psychological survival, forging bonds not easily broken. Each narrator tells his version of the story, painting a vivid portrait of life lived within and in opposition to the moral strictures of North Africa. Set against a backdrop of repression and disillusionment, The Last Friend is a tale of loss of innocence and a nation’s coming of age.

Leaving Tangier

Tangier, in the early 1990s: Young Moroccans gather regularly in a seafront cafe to gaze at the lights on the Spanish coast glimmering in the distance. Facing a future with few prospects in a country they feel has failed them, their disillusionment is matched only by their desire to reach this paradise so close and yet so far, not least because of the treacherous waters separating the two countries and the frightening stories they hear of the fates of would be illegal emigrants. A young man called Azel is intent upon leaving one way or another. At the brink of despair he meets Miguel, a wealthy Spanish gallery owner, who promises to take him to Barcelona if Azel will become his lover. Seeing no other solution, and although he has a girlfriend to whom he is promised, Azel agrees to Miguel’s proposition and thus begins a different kind of hell for the young Moroccan shame and self disgust at his own helplessness gradually overcome him and he finds himself once more in a hopeless situation. Azel and others like him, including his sister, begin to wonder if the reality of life in Europe will live up to their dreams.

A Palace in the Old Village

The latest novel from ‘Morocco’s greatest living author’ The Guardian Award winning, internationally bestselling author Tahar Ben Jelloun’s new novel is the story of an immigrant named Mohammed who has spent forty years in France and is about to retire. Taking stock of his life his devotion to Islam and to his assimilated children he decides to return to Morocco, where he spends his life’s savings building the biggest house in the village and waits 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 an immigrant’s abiding pursuit of home.

Racism Explained to My Daughter

The prize winning book of advice about racism from the bestselling author to his daughter, introduced by Bill Cosby. When Tahar Ben Jelloun took his ten year old daughter to a street protest against anti immigration laws in Paris, she asked question after question: ‘What is racism? What is an immigrant? What is discrimination?’ Out of their frank discussion comes this book, an international bestseller translated into twenty languages. Ben Jelloun has created a unique and compelling dialogue in which he explains difficult concepts from ghettos and genocide to slavery and anti Semitism in language we can all understand, and adds an all new chapter for this edition. Also included are personal essays from four prizewinning writers and educators who themselves are parents: Patricia Williams, David Mura, William Ayers, and Lisa D. Delpit. Elegant and sensitive, and available now for the first time in paperback, Racism Explained to My Daughter is for all parents and educators who have struggled to engage their children in discussions of this complex issue. Winner of the 1998 United Nations Global Tolerance Award and the 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award.

French Hospitality

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.

Islam Explained

A uniquely accessible introduction to Islam, by the celebrated author of Racism Explained to My Daughter. 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, 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 key words 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. 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.

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