Cairo
- 2018
The young who filled Tahrir Square in 2011, and the men who crushed them.
- 2006
- 2002
A faded downtown Cairo block, from the old pasha’s flat to the families on its roof.
Alexandria
- 1996
A Muslim sheikh and a Copt become friends in Alexandria under the bombs of 1940–42.
- 1994
- 1986
Upper Egypt
- 1945
- 1944
- 1937
Algiers
- 2017
- 2010
1957, the battle of Algiers: a French captain and the torture he can no longer bear.
- 1942
Algerian Sahara
- 1950Tassili, Algerian Sahara
A French officer and a Tuareg guide look for a lost caravan route through the Tassili.
- 1949
An American couple drift ever further south into the Algerian Sahara, after the war.
- 1919
Oran
- 2024
- 2013also Algiers
The brother of the Arab Meursault killed answers back, from a bar in Oran.
- 2008
1930s–1962: an Arab boy raised among the colonists of Oran, and a love the war forbids.
Kabylia
- 2017
A Kabyle farmer sides with France in the war, and his children and grandchildren pay.
- 1950
A shepherd’s son from a Kabyle mountain village, the first of them to go to school.
Constantine
- 1956
Tangier
- 2012also Barcelona
A young Moroccan from Tangier washes up in Barcelona’s Raval as the Arab Spring begins.
- 2006
- 1991
A prying American couple threatens Ripley’s country life, and he takes Héloïse to Tangier.
Fez
- 1994
- 1986
1488–1492: a boy’s childhood in Granada, until the city falls and his family flees.
- 1954
Marrakech
- 1992
Two small girls and their hippie mother in 1960s Marrakech, the girls longing for home.
- 1967
Camels, storytellers, beggars and the blind: a writer listens to Marrakesh in 1954.
Meknès
- 2020
An Alsatian bride follows her Moroccan officer to a hard farm near Meknès after the war.
Casablanca
- 2010
Tunis
- 2020
1935: a rumoured affair with Tahar Haddad tears apart two great families of Tunis.
- 2014
- 1979
Tripoli
- 2011
A boy among the women of 1950s Tripoli, in their courtyards, baths and rooftop talk.
- 2006
1979, Tripoli: a boy of nine watches Gaddafi’s men come for his father’s friends.
Benghazi
- 2016
Libyan Sahara
- 1990
A Tuareg herdsman guards the cave paintings of the Libyan desert, and its last wild sheep.
Ngong Hills
- 1960
Blixen remembers her Somali servant Farah and the farm’s people, thirty years on.
- 1937
Amboseli
- 1958
Réunion
- 2013
A wife vanishes from a Réunion hotel; her husband flees across the island with their girl.
- 1832
Mayotte
- 2016Mamoudzou, Mayotte
Kaweni, the slum called Gaza: a boy adopted by a nurse falls among lost children.
Johannesburg
- 1948
A Zulu pastor from Ixopo looks for his son in Johannesburg, and finds him a murderer.
Kimberley
- 1884
Cape Town
- 1999
Eastern Nigeria
- 2006Nsukka, Eastern Nigeria
1960s: a houseboy, twin sisters and a professor in Nsukka, through the Biafran war.
- 1991
Timbuktu
- 1830
Disguised as a Muslim, the first European to reach Timbuktu and come back, in 1828.
Dakar
- 1979
A widow of Dakar writes to her friend of her marriage and her husband’s second wife.
Djibouti
- 1931Tadjoura, Djibouti
1910s: pearls, hashish and guns, smuggled by dhow from the Gulf of Tadjoura.
Harar
- 1984
1880–1891: Rimbaud’s Harar, trading in coffee and guns, retraced by Borer on the spot.
Ubangi
- 1927Bangui, Ubangi
Gide goes up the rivers of French Equatorial Africa and finds the concessions’ abuses.