At times strikingly lucid, at others stirringly implicated, this history of Algeria from its 1956 struggle for independence to the present day, records the horrors of civil war and the complex social and political issues that have drowned the country in bloodshed. Living in exile, Djebar expresses her guilt for fleeing murder when so many of her colleagues have been killed and, in a work that is part history and part memoir, expresses universal truths about the pain of loss ‘A hymn to friendship and the power of language’ The New York Times