First novel in French by a writer of Afghan origin

Under the tutelage of Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn, a novel of emancipation inhabited by the urgency of living, from a childhood hampered in the Afghan countryside to the discovery of the streets of Kabyle, of love, freedom and the powers of fiction.

This first novel in French by an Afghan writer is the story of a quest. The narrator, the son of a leading local mullah who grows up in a small Afghan village in the 1990s, is thrown out of the family home by his father. For the next few years, his life is characterised by ennui, a fear of famine, a lack of prospects, and a pervasive ambiance of animosity. One day, at the prompting of his engineer friend, who talks to him about the Kabul of his youth and awakens him to the possibilities of music, love and desire, but also out of necessity, he sets out for the capital.

Now a young man, this is where he enters the ‘real world’ – in the company of two literature- and philosophy-loving ‘ruffians’, he experiences the city in all its intensity, drinking himself senseless, frequenting brothels in search of a little tenderness, playing carrom, expounding on every subject under the sun, and trying to keep the phantoms of the past at bay. But one fine morning it seems that this dashing lifestyle is about to come apart at the seams.

A deeply moving account of a country gradually collapsing under the weight of religious obscurantism, this book is first and foremost a championing of the powers of fiction and an ode to the impulse to live freely.