Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me
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€15.99
It's spring 1990 in a dingy small-town Moroccan bar. Zina is serving drinks when a mysterious man approaches her. The man gives Zina a handwritten note from her husband, Aziz, who disappeared the day after their wedding, eighteen years ago, after participating in the failed 1972 coup against King Hassan II. Zina has spent the past eighteen years searching for Aziz, who has been imprisoned in inhuman conditions in a solitary cell inside a secret desert jail. Will Zina finally find Aziz? Moving back and forth between 1990 and the past, A Rare Blue Bird That Flies with Me recounts the painful circumstances that brought Zina and Aziz together and the torture after the 1972 coup that tore them apart. Told from the perspective of several narrators-including Zina, Aziz, Aziz's two jailors-Youssef Fadel's novel is a masterful history of modern Morocco.
Award-winning Moroccan novelist and screenwriter Youssef Fadel was born in Casablanca in 1949. During Morocco's so-called 'Years of Lead' he was imprisoned in the notorious Moulay al-Sheriff prison (1974-75). A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me is his ninth novel. He lives in Casablanca, Morocco.Associate Professor of Arabic at Dartmouth, Jonathan Smolin received his doctorate from Harvard. His research interests include Modern Arabic literature, crime and police fiction and illegal immigration. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture (2013). He lives and works in Hanover, NH, USA.