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Parthian Books

La Blanche

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  • £8.99


Parthian Carnivale series title

Creative Europe award title

Nominated for the La Mamounia Literary Award

        Casablanca, 1992. In a white Art Deco villa, a man is pushed down the marble staircase to his death. His murder, never truly explained, fractures a family, a way of life, and the minds of both his wife and his daughter. To survive, his nine-year-old granddaughter carefully suppresses her memories until twenty years later, when her life is once more ripped apart, this time by a disastrous love affair. Returning to Casablanca, she relives the tragedy of her grandfather’s murder and the events surrounding it. But now she sees it all not simply through the eyes of an innocent child, but with an adult’s awareness that things – and people – might not always be quite as they seem.

        In a beautifully constructed first-person narrative that shifts in time and place, young French-Moroccan writer Maї-Do Hamisultane weaves a delicate web of fact and fiction. Her prose – sometimes luminous, often powerfully cinematographic – has drawn comparisons with Marguerite Duras, one of France’s most famous novelists and experimental film-makers.

        ABOUT THE AUTHOR

        author photo

        Maï-Do Hamisultane is a Franco-Moroccan writer born in La Rochelle in 1983. After a childhood spent between Cap d’Antibes and
        Casablanca, she studied at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris, before going on to study medicine and specialise in psychiatry. As the literary critic Meriem El Youssoufi points out, the literary works of Maï-Do
        Hamisultane navigate between the real and the imaginary. La Blanche was nominated for the prestigious Prix La Mamounia in 2014. Hamisultane's other work includes Santo Sospir (2015), and Lettres à
        Abel (2017).