Description

The daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends hours a day commuting into the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian life. She goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing years of therapy. As she gains distance from her family, she grapples with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn’t know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing.

‘Through fiction, I was able to explore everything that had made me,’ Daas says. ‘Being a woman, but not what was expected of a woman. Being a north African woman, but also French, the only member of the family born in France. Being lesbian, being Muslim. It was almost a luxury for me, through fiction, to make all those identities coexist in my central character. I knew that those identities were in tension and confrontation in society, but for once, through fiction, I felt like I was liberating and reconciling them’

Publisher Review

'Daas has chosen not to play the designated role of 'the chick from the banlieue who made it'. All of this makes her path harder, as does her unwillingness to iron out the conflict she sees between her religion and her sexuality. This has made for a fine first novel' (NLR); 'The writing triumphs by keeping a low profile, without trying to make too much noise, and with a show of compassion for her people' (Virginie Despentes); Fatima Daas has written a first novel with percussive lyricism. With a narrator torn between 'the forbidden' and her desire' (Livres Hebdo);'An absorbing exploration of sexuality and religion in the mainly Muslim Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, Daas's debut is a nuanced tale of finding one's place in the world fired by a desire to belong forged in one's own truth' (New European)