Yasmina Khadra

Mohammed Moulessehoul known as Yasmina Khadra (b.January 10,1955) is an Algerian author.

Yasmina Khadra is the nom de plume of the former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul. He is the author of six other books published in English, among them The Attack and The Swallows of Kabul, In the Name of God, and Wolf Dreams. He took the feminine pseudonym to avoid submitting his manuscripts for approval by military censors while he was still in the army.

Yamina Khadra is a very productive Algerian writer. He always felt like a writer, even though he was an officer in the Algerian army for 36 years. He was born in the Sahara Desert. His father was a male nurse and his mother was a nomad. In 1964 his father sent him to a military school in Algeria, where he discovered literature and his love for writing. He chose to write in French because his French teacher encouraged him and also because of the censorship of the Algerian authorities. He started with short stories in 1973 in a book called "Houria". In 1975 he joined the Military Academy of Cherchell, where he became on officer. He resigned from the army in 2000 because his writing activity was not compatible with his military duties. After producing a couple of books of short stories, he decided to write some thrillers, to take place during the dreadful years of terrorism in Algeria. He also created at the same time his alter ego, Commissaire Mohammed Llob, his personal spokesman for a present-day Algeria. He revealed his true name and story in his autobiography, "L'Ecrivain", in 2001. He explained that his nickname comes from his wife's surnames, because he admires the courage of women in general and of his wife in particular. The rights of his book "L'Attentat" ("The Attack") were bought by the producers of Brokeback Mountain (2005). His book, "Les Sirenes de Bagdad", (2006) is about the conflict in Iraq. his latest book "Ce que le jour doit à la nuit",(2008). Yasmina Khadra is now living in Aix en Provence in the south of France.

http://www.yasmina-khadra.com/index.php


The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra

Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, who was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersect... more »ing their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man who has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq and is now dying of sickness and despair.

Desperate, exhausted Mohsen wanders through Kabul when he is surrounded by a crowd about to stone an adulterous woman. Numbed by the hysterical atmosphere and drawn into their rage, he too throws stones at the face of the condemned woman buried up to her waist. With this gesture the lives of all four protagonists move toward their destinies.

The Swallows of Kabul is a dazzling novel written with compassion and exquisite detail by one of the most lucid writers about the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world. Yasmina Khadra brings readers into the hot, dusty streets of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair.

(Source:paperbackswap.com)

From my Shelf Books

ESTHER´S INHERITANCE by Sándor Márai

What is it to be in love with a pathological liar and fantasist? Esther is, and has been for more than twenty years. Lajos, the liar, married her sister, and when she died, Lajos disappeared. Or did he? And Esther? She was left with her elderly cousin, the all-knowing Nunu, and a worn old house, living a life of the most modest comforts. All is well, but all is tired.

Until a telegram arrives announcing that, after all these years, Lajos is returning with his children. The news brings both panic and excitement. While no longer young and thoroughly skeptical about Lajos and his lies, Esther still remembers how incredibly alive she felt when he was around. Lajos's presence bewitches everyone, and the greatest part of his charm—and his danger—lies in the deftness with which he wields that delicate power. Nothing good can come of this: friends rally round, but Lajos's arrival, complete with entourage, begins a day of high theater.

Esther's Inheritance has the taut economy of Márai's Embers and presents a remarkable narrator in Esther, who delivers the story as both tragedy and comedy on an intimate scale that nevertheless has archetypal power.
Source: (fantasticfiction.co.uk)

UNDER THE SKIN by Michel Faber

"Isserley always drove straight past a hitchhiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up."

In Michel Faber's suspenseful first novel, Isserley, an unusual-looking woman with strangely scarred skin, drives through the Scottish Highlands both day and night, looking for just the right male hitchhikers. She picks them up, makes enough small talk to determine she's made a safe choice, then hits a toggle switch on her car, releasing a drug that knocks her victims out. She then takes them to the "farm" where she lives-and where the "processing" takes place-a terrifying procedure involving the removal of various body parts.

In this upside-down world that Faber has so strikingly created, animals are human, and humans are known as "vodsels." Isserley, at one time a beautiful "human" covered in fur with a long tail, is now a foreigner in the "vodsel" world, sent there to collect as many victims as possible. And what becomes of the men she collects is just the beginning of an even more sinister secret. In this world, looks are extremely deceiving; it's what's Under the Skin that truly counts. A disturbing, yet thought-provoking metaphor for a society run amok, this ferociously creative fiction debut will linger in readers' imaginations long after they've passed the last hitchhiker on the highway.
Source: (fantasticfiction.co.uk)

GREY SOULS by Philippe Claudel

This is ostensibly a detective story, about a crime that is committed in 1917, and solved 20 years later. The location is a small town in Northern France, near V., in the dead of the freezing winter. The war is still being fought in the trenches, within sight and sound of the town, but the men of the town have been spared the slaughter because they are needed in the local factory. One morning a beautiful ten year old girl, one of the three daughters of the innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal. Suspicion falls on two deserters who are picked up near the town. Their interrogation and sentencing is brutal and swift. Twenty years later, the narrator, a local policeman, puts together what actually happened. On the night the deserters were arrested and interrogated, he was sitting by the beside of his dying wife. He believes that justice was not done and wants to set the record straight. But the death of the child was not the only crime committed in the town during those weeks. More than one record has to be set straight. Beautiful, like a fairy story almost, frozen in time, this novel has an hypnotic quality.

Source: (fantasticfiction.co.uk)