The award-winning, #1 internationally bestselling new novel by the
author of The Perfect Nanny, about a woman in an interracial marriage
whose fierce desire for autonomy parallels her adopted country's fight
for independence
The world of men is just like the world of botany. In the end, one
species dominates another. One day, the orange will win out over the
lemon, or vice versa, and the tree will once again produce fruit that
people can eat.
In her first new novel since The Perfect Nanny launched her onto the
world stage and won her acclaim for her "devastatingly perceptive
character studies" (The New York Times Book Review), Leila Slimani
draws on her own family's inspiring story for the first volume in a
planned trilogy about race, resilience, and women's empowerment.
Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a
handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After
the war, the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate
his family farm's rocky terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by
the isolation, the harsh climate, the lack of money, and the mistrust
she inspires as a foreigner. Left increasingly alone to raise her two
children in a world whose rules she does not understand, and with her
daughter taunted at school by rich French girls for her secondhand
clothes and unruly hair, Mathilde goes from being reduced to a farmer's
wife to defying the country's chauvinism and repressive social codes by
offering medical services to the rural population.
As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine
finds himself caught in the crossfire: in solidarity with his Moroccan
workers yet also a landowner, despised by the French yet married to a
Frenchwoman, and proud of his wife's resolve but ashamed by her refusal
to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of others--especially
the women, forced to live in the land of men--and with this novel, Leila
Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation.
