A Bookshop in Algiers

Description

A Bookshop in Algiers celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto 'by the young, for the young', discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. A Bookshop in Algiers interweaves Charlot's story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad, who is dispatched to the old shop in 2017 to empty it of books and repaint it. Ryad's no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop's self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man's mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it's a hymn to the book and to the love of books.

Kaouther Adimi is a young Algerian novelist living in France. A Bookshop in Algiers is her third novel and was published in France in 2017, where it sold over 50,000 copies and received the trifecta of major French award nominations for the Goncourt, Renaudot and Medicis prizes.

Truly potent ... Adimi confronts us with episodes that are simply never spoken of in France * The New York Times Book Review * If you're in a bookshop browsing, then A Bookshop In Algiers is for you, by definition. A beautiful little novel about books, history, ambition and the importance of literature to everyone, especially people who are trying to find a voice. -- Nick Hornby A splendid declaration of love to literature * Elle * A Bookshop in Algiers reminds us that in literature, as in life, we belong to a place only temporarily - and we shape it according to our memories * Financial Times * Adimi refuses to make Charlot's life a tragedy. Instead, she's told a moving story of his efforts to push so many worthy writers toward posterity's heights. * Harper's * A beautiful and bittersweet book * New Books magazine *