France, Story of a Childhood

“An unflinching look at the complex relationship between France and Algeria. . . . [Rahmani] poses difficult questions about assimilation.”—World Literature Today

“Timely. . . . This coming-of-age memoir describes an intellectually gifted girl, of Muslim origin, who seeks to liberate herself from the narrow-mindedness of the village and from the traditionalist and religious strictures applied to her by her father. . . . France offers an arresting description of how an individual such as Rahmani can endeavor to comprehend her origins . . . but especially to transcend them.”—John Taylor, Arts Fuse

“[An] independent spirit is her narrator’s signature. . . . The narrative embodies its liberation by shifting willfully from jittery observation to passages of straightforward memoir to lyricism. . . . The longer memoiristic flights are the most artful and moving. . . . The urgency of Rahmani’s story is never in question.”—Ron Slate, On the Seawall

Longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose, given by the American Literary Translation Association

“Gracefully, elliptically, France, Story of a Childhood presents Rahmani’s anxious emergence from the imaginative terrain of youth. With its appeal to humanity in the face of the politics of exclusion, this beautiful translation could not be more timely.”—Mark Sussman, Hunter College