The art of losing

Author: Alice Zneiter Publication date: 2023 Book genre: Short stories and novels Publisher: Wassem Publications Number of pages: 442 Format: Paperback Synopsis of the novel: Algeria, from which Naima's family hails, was for a long time just a background in a painting that did not pique the girl’s interest. However, everything in French society, as a society troubled by issues of identity, wants to reconnect her to her roots. But what connection can she have to a family story that has never been told to her? Her grandfather Ali, the Kabyle mountain man, died before she could ask him why history made him a mover. Perhaps her grandmother "Yima" has the answer, but not in a language Naima understands. As for her father Hamid, who arrived in France in the summer of 1962 to the makeshift transit camps hastily set up, he no longer talks about his childhood in Algeria. How can she revive a land of silence? Alice Zneiter narrates, through an impactful and bold narrative, the fate of successive generations of a family imprisoned by a stubborn past, a fate that moves between France and Algeria. A powerful novel about the freedom to be human, beyond inherited legacy and intimate or social constraints.