| Last week, we were fighting crime in the icy climes of Iceland. Today, you can shed the parkas and the Mukluks and come to the land of the Sahara and the souks, exquisite architecture and intricate imperial cities. Morocco is one of my favorite settings for a novel because its blend of Eastern and African culture is often disorienting and unsettling for Westerners and they behave in ways that might seem unthinkable in their hometowns.
That’s the subtext of Lawrence Osborne’s "The Forgiven," published in 2012. I love this novel! The Hennigers of London — David, a doctor with a drinking problem, and Jo, a children’s book writer whose ideas have long since dried up — have been invited to a weekend bacchanal in the Moroccan desert. But driving to their host’s estate, David Henniger strikes and kills a young man on the road. The novel then swings between the lavish party, the appearance and demands of the young man’s father, and the violent secret the victim carried until his death.
Leïla Slimani is probably best known for her thriller, “The Perfect Nanny,” but her novel, “In the Country of Others” published last summer is much more compelling, in my view. The story, drawn from Slimani’s own family history, introduces us to Amine, a Moroccan soldier in the French army, who meets Mathilde when he is stationed in her mountain village in Alsace, France. The two fall in love and marry and return to the family farm in Morocco, which is where the tension quickly accelerates. Mathilde struggles with the customs of her new country and the expectations of her new family and realizes "...that she is a foreigner, a woman, a wife, a being at the mercy of others."
My third book is Tahir Shah’s “The Caliph’s House,” published in 2006. Based on the decision by Shah and his wife to leave London and move their young children to a rundown neighborhood in Casablanca, the book narrates the romanticism and the foolhardiness of such a move. It costs tens of thousands to make their house, a 10-room sprawling mansion, even livable. The caretakers are convinced the place is beset by demons. And yet they settle in and make a life, the story of how they did it is remarkable.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 