Books set in Algeria

A tiny Algiers bookshop, from Camus’s first publisher in 1936 to the day it closes.

1957, the battle of Algiers: a French captain and the torture he can no longer bear.

Superintendent Llob looks for a missing girl in Algiers, in the black decade of the 1990s.

A poor childhood in Belcourt, Algiers, with a deaf mother and a hard grandmother.

The French taking of Algiers in 1830, woven with a girl’s life under the colony.

The women of Algiers after independence, behind the doors of Delacroix’s painting.

A clerk in Algiers buries his mother, goes swimming, and shoots an Arab on a beach.

Sun on the ruins of Tipasa, wind at Djémila, and summer on the beaches of Algiers.

A painter’s year in a Moorish house above Algiers, 1852–53, and the life of its streets.

A Kabyle farmer sides with France in the war, and his children and grandchildren pay.

The young men of a Kabyle village in the Second World War, called up, in love, or leaving.

A shepherd’s son from a Kabyle mountain village, the first of them to go to school.

Four young men and the woman they all love, between the gorges of Constantine and Bône.

A woman whose throat was cut in the civil war speaks to the daughter she carries, in Oran.

The brother of the Arab Meursault killed answers back, from a bar in Oran.

1930s–1962: an Arab boy raised among the colonists of Oran, and a love the war forbids.

Plague shuts Oran for a year, and a doctor and a few men fight it street by street.

1939: a hungry boy in a crowded house in Tlemcen, as the war begins.

An American couple drift ever further south into the Algerian Sahara, after the war.

A young Swiss woman in Arab dress rides alone through the oases of the Algerian south.

A sick young husband recovers in the oasis of Biskra, and discovers what he desires.

A painter’s summer of 1853 at Laghouat, the oasis the French had taken the year before.