An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France, This Blinding Absence of Light is the latest work by internationally renowned author Tahar Ben Jelloun, the first North African winner of the Prix Goncourt and winner of the Prix Mahgreb. Crafting real life events into narrative fiction, Ben Jelloun reveals the horrific story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies in underground cells with no light and only enough food and water to keep them lingering on the edge of death. Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben Jelloun narrates the story in the simplest of language and delivers a shocking novel that explores both the limitlessness of inhumanity and the impossible endurance of the human will.

This Blinding Absence of Light

Literature & Fiction

BEN JELLOUN, Tahar

Contemporary

Penguin??Books

Renowned for his compeling , humane portraits of everyday Arab lives, Tahar Ben Jelloun has affirmed his place in the literary world by winning such awards as the Prix Goncourt and Prix Maghreb. In The Last Friend, Ben Jelloun presents a spellbinding coming-of-age story and a dazzling portrait of Morocco in an era of repression and disillusionment. In Tangiers in the late 1950s, two teenagers, Mamed and Ali, strike up an intense friendship that will last a lifetime. But lurking just beneath the surface is a deep, unspoken jealousy in danger of destroying them both.

The Last Friend

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Publishing Group

From one of the world's great writers, a novel that mirrors the journeys of millions who leave home for a better life In Leaving Tangier, award-winning, internationally bestselling author Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of a Moroccan brother and sister making new lives for themselves in Spain. Azel is a young man in Tangier who dreams of crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. When he meets Miguel, a wealthy Spaniard, he leaves behind his girlfriend, his sister, Kenza, and his mother, and moves with him to Barcelona, where Kenza eventually joins them. What they find there forms the heart of this novel of seduction and betrayal, deception and disillusionment, in which Azel and Kenza are reminded powerfully not only of where they've come from, but also of who they really are.

Leaving Tangier: A Novel

From "Morocco's greatest living author" (The Guardian), an internationally bestselling novel of universal appeal—about the powerful pull of home and the lengths to which a parent will go to bring his family together Mohammed has spent the past forty years working in France. As he approaches retirement, he takes stock of his life—his devotion to Islam and to his assimilated children—and decides to return to Morocco, where he spends his life’s savings building the biggest house in the village and waiting for his children and grandchildren to come be with him. A heartbreaking novel about parents and children, A Palace in the Old Village captures the sometimes stark contrasts between old- and new-world values, and immigrant’s abiding pursuit of home.

A Palace in the Old Village: A Novel

Zahra tries to find happiness after her father's death, but is caught up in the world of brothels and prisons

Sacred Night (English and French Edition)

Literary

Harcourt

After seven daughters a Moroccan father decides his eighth child will by a son and heir no matter what its gender

The Sand Child (English and French Edition)

In the legendary city of Tangier, an old man lies dying, and remembers the lives of those who died before him

Silent Day in Tangier

The award-winning novelist and author of the international bestseller Racism Explained to My Daughter uses his own experience to illuminate the experience of the Other in his adopted land―and everywhere. A Moroccan who emigrated to France in 1971, Tahar Ben Jelloun draws upon his own encounters with racism along with his insights as a practicing psychologist and gifted novelist to elucidate the racial divisions that plague contemporary society. In a modern France where openly racist leaders such as National Front spokesman Jean-Marie Le Pen have made significant strides toward broad popular acceptance, Ben Jelloun's book is more topical now than ever. His profound and compelling appeal for tolerance―in both public discourse and the law―is a passionate yet reasoned argument that racism simply does not make sense in the multicultural world of today. French Hospitality confronts issues of international resonance: the relationship of a formerly colonized people to their onetime colonizers, the encounter between Islam and the modern Judeo-Christian West, and the status of the non-European minorities in Europe today. Underlying these issues is a heartfelt nostalgia for simple, traditional North African hospitality as practiced since time immemorial by a relatively poor and unsophisticated society. Ben Jelloun supplements this rather noble ideal of generosity and welcoming by borrowing the philosophical concept of hospitality―the opening of oneself to another―from the works of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida in order to illustrate the moral conception of a nation's unconditional acceptance of foreigners. Isn't the belief in welcoming strangers a fundamental mark of civilization? In a political climate where increasingly repressive immigration laws are a national trend as well as an international phenomenon, he contends, it is not surprising that racism has gained a foothold. Most hurt by racist polemic and politics, he points out, are children of immigrants―born in France, their memories are those of the French people, and they deserve to be treated with the full respect afforded to any citizen. With his elegant and imaginative prose, Ben Jelloun shows us both racism's face and the immigrant's heartbreak; but he also evokes the wind of freedom and the ideal of hospitality, and with this gesture offers a kind of hope in extricating ourselves from racism's recidivist incoherencies.

Rural Social Work Practice

History

Africa

Columbia University Press

<div>An innocent man's gripping personal account of terrifying confinement by the Moroccan military during the reign of a formidable twentieth-century despot In 1967 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a peaceful young political protestor, was one of nearly a hundred other hapless men taken into punitive custody by the Moroccan army. It was a time of dangerous importance in Moroccan history, and they were treated with a chilling brutality that not all of them survived. This powerful portrait of the narrator's traumatic experience, written with a memoirist's immediacy, reveals both his helpless terror and his desperate hope to survive by drawing strength from his love of literature. Shaken to the core by his disillusionment with a brutal regime, unsure of surviving his ordeal, he stole some paper and began secretly to write, with the admittedly romantic idea of leaving some testament behind, a veiled denunciation of the evils of his time. His first poem was published after he was unexpectedly released, and his vocation was born.</div>

The Punishment (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Yale University Press

After seven daughters a Moroccan father decides his eighth child will be a son and heir no matter what its gender

Sand Child

Ballantine Books

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Books by BEN JELLOUN, Tahar