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A fictionalized autobiography, covering his youth in Algeria. It is filled with details of the white working class to which he belonged and there is the undercurrent of a boy's search for a father figure, his own killed in World War I. He describes the intervention of a school teacher who obtained for him a scholarship, first step on the road to the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature.

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

In November 1942 the Allies are poised to liberate Algeria from the Vichy French regime, a client state of Nazi Germany. This is hoped, will squeeze Rommel's Afirka Korps between two forces and sweep him from North Africa. But no one knows whether the French will greet the Americans as friends or foes. Based on family connections rather than experience, Billy Boyle, a young Irish-American cop from Boston, has become General Dwight D. Eisenhower's...

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family's history, this masterful story follows the Cassars over seven decades (from 1940-2010), starting with patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them, and ending with Chloe, who believes telling her family's buried stories will bring them all peace.

"In 1627, Barbary pirates raided an island off the Iceland coast - and abducted the 400 inhabitants into slavery in Algiers. Among them was a pastor, his wife and their three children. The pastor was sent back on a failed mission to seek ransom. But what actually happened to the women and children - what was their fate? Captive in an alien Arab culture, the pastor's wife meets the unravelling of her identity and the least bearable of losses - her...