In The Country Of Others by Leila Slimani

The author draws on her own family history in this, the first installment in what is proposed to be a trilogy. The book begins in 1944 when Mathilde, a passionate young Frenchwoman from Alsace, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier fighting for the French. She marries him and after the war they go together to live in Morocco, first with his mother and siblings in the city of Meknes, and then to the hectares of stony countryside that Amine has inherited from his father, who wanted to build a farm there and grow fruit and almond trees. Slimani’s grandmother was in fact an Alsatian girl, Anne Dhobb, who married a Moroccan soldier; together they built up a fruit farm near Meknes. Dhobb published her own memoir in Morocco in 2004, and we have to assume it helped the author with this story. There are interwoven themes of cultures clashing--France and Morocco, Christian and Muslim, French and Arabic, colonizer and colonized--that pair with the tensions that are happening in the home. Accommodations are made within Amine and Mathilde's difficult marriage; the boundaries between cultures turn out to be more porous than they appear at first. Mathilde is volatile and histrionic but she’s also valiantly inventive, finding ways to adjust to her new country, and to love it. Amine doesn’t kill his sister Selma who is in love with a glamorous French airman – and is pregnant with his child. The book erupts at the end when those who demand independence fight against family members into an explosive ending.