A Country For Dying — New Beacon Books

An exquisite novel of North Africans in Paris by one of the most original and necessary voices in world literature (David Ebershoff)

Paris, summer of 2010. Zahira is a Moroccan prostitute late in her career whose generosity is her way of defying her humiliation and misery. Her friend Aziz, a male prostitute, admires her and emulates her. Aziz is transitioning from his past as a man into the womanhood of his future, and asks Zahira to help him choose a name for himself as a woman. Motjaba is an Iranian revolutionary, a refugee in Paris, a gay man fleeing his country at the end of his rope, who finds refuge for a few days with Zahira. And then there is Allal, Zahira s first love, who comes to Paris years later to save their love.

The world of A Country for Dying is a world of dreamers, of lovers, for whom the price of dreaming is one they must pay with their flesh. Writes Taïa, ‘So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people s future.’

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These linked stories combine a lightness of touch, a deep lyricism, an openness to beauty and mystery, with an undercurrent of daring, fierce, erotic energy and images of shocking brutality and challenging complexity. Infidels manages to create a picture of an entire world as well as tender portraits of the individuals whose lives are so memorably dramatized here. Colm Tóibín on Infidels

This is what you might get if you updated Jean Genet to the age of terror: A blade-like novel forged in the fires of righteous anger and tempered with prose of classical beauty. Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Abdellah Taïa is one of the most original and necessary voices in world literature . With each novel Taïa grows as an artist and expands our knowledge of what it means to be an outsider inside the Muslim world. David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife

Author; Abdellah Taïa

Publisher; Seven Stories Press

ISBN; 9781609809904