Honestly I am in doubt how to rate this book. This is quite heartbreaking story about love, relations, family, solitude, difference, fight and everything is happening at the same time with the difficult period of the life of Marocco. What I can say with certainty is that I enjoyed this book much more than the Lullaby by Leïla Slimani.

I really liked the characters and how author created different problems and difficulties which they face throughout the story (for instance how Mathilde tries to fit into new for her culture and society and how then her daughter struggles in school). Furthermore, author's depiction of the history of Marocco is incredible. The country truly becomes independent character of the book. At the same time from time to time I got bored and found some parts of the story kind of repetitive and wanted the book to run faster.

Overall, I would give the book 3.5 and 4 stars in total.

I would like to thank NetGalley and the author for providing me with the e-copy in exchange for honest review,

“Everything she achieved was doomed to disappear, to be erased. That was the fate of all small, domestice lives, she thought, where endless repetition of the same tasks ended up eating away the soul.”

‘The Country of Others’ is very different to the other works by Slimani that I have read in the past in terms of how she writes this novel. Her signature feature of transgressive female characters does however continue in this novel.

The book focuses on the interracial marriage of Mathilde, a French Christian woman, and Amine, a Moroccan Muslim soldier who fall in love when Amine was stationed in France during the Second World War. Mathilde, naïve with regards to the complexities of what her relationship will develop into once they leave the romanticised bubble they occupy in France, moves to Morocco with her husband. She experiences a massive culture shock, something she was not prepared for. Not only is the landscape on which they set up their home harsh and inhospitable, but Mathilde has to now live in a place where she is a second class citizen with no freedom.

This is a multi-generational story with sections of the book dedicated to secondary characters such as Aïcha, the couple’s biracial daughter who experiences intense bullying when she goes to a Catholic school in the local town (her parents fight intensely over whether or not she should be schooled; Mathilde insists upon it much to her husband’s anger and consternation). Amine’s younger sister, Selma, a strong-willed teenager, yearns to be free of the repression she experiences in her family and in society in general. The inclusion of the voices of these two characters adds a further interesting dimension to the story unfolding on the pages. The book is character-driven and Slimani succeeds in capturing each of the characters’ essence and the emotions and feelings that they are dealing with, along with the tensions in their respective relationships with one another.

The prevailing theme running as a thread throughout this book is the sense of ‘other’. Amine, although he is a Moroccan, does not feel as if he belongs among his own people, particularly in the current climate of nationalist unrest with the Moroccan people fighting for their freedom. The fight for independence is not limited just to the country; the female characters each fight their own battles to be independent and free in different ways. Mathilde, for example, wants to be accepted, but she also harbours her own prejudiced views about the society in which she now finds herself and yearns to be a free woman in France again.

Other prominent themes discussed by the author throughout the novel include wealth versus poverty, the division of classes, religious divide, racism, prejudice and racial stereotypes. Slimani also touches upon the effects of war on former soldiers with Amine and also his friend suffering from mental health issues and PTSD.

Slimani provides the reader with an interesting commentary on the social and historical context of Morocco and its people in the period of national unrest in the 1950s. The relationship between the characters is beautifully written by Slimani and although very different to her previous novels, ‘The Country of Others’ is an intriguing work of historical fiction.

Thank you to NetGalley, Leïla Slimani and Faber & Faber LTD for the advanced copy in return for my honest review.

I'm sure that this novel by Leïla Slimani will be appreciated by many, alas, not moi. There was a vague soap-operashy quality to Slimani's storytelling that brought to mind Isabel Allende but whereas that works in the latter's work, here...not so much. One of the first scenes is super cheesy and eye-roll worthy. A scene in which our main female character is masturbating is juxtaposed with descriptions of soldiers dying and the chaos of the war...and I found that 1) painfully contrived 2) low-key of poor taste.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a copy of this book.

I’m a huge fan of Leila slimani’s previous novels and so I requested this immediately. There is no doubt that it is well written. She switches between characters perspectives so easily and effortlessly.

However the place and subject matter didn’t appeal to me on a personal level so I found it hard to enjoy.

Leila Slimani is known for her writing about transgressive women, women who break rules and are punished for them. In Lullaby and Adele, the constraints were rules hemming women into a particular version of the wife and the mother. In this book based on Slimani’s grandmother, the rule is broken through miscegenation. ⁣⁣
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Mathilde is an Alsatian woman who, in a wartime romance, falls in love with and marries a Moroccan soldier who is stationed in her village. When the war ends she moves to Morocco to make a life with this man. Yet the rules have changed for them both, the partial suspension of wartime giving way to all the other complexities unavoidable in their situation. Her compatriots express disdain for her husband, and her adoptive home is increasingly hostile with the winds of decolonisation stirring. Her husband Amine is also in conflict, caught between the cosmopolitan, progressive man he was able to be in France and the traditional role he feels compelled to fill in his homeland. ⁣⁣
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The other central tension in this book is gender, told through a selection of female characters. Amine’s mother embodies the traditional role of carer and giver, and Mathilde reacts to her with a shock her husband brushes aside. In contrast her daughter Selma is young and sensual with a beauty so frightening it turns her brothers violent in their misguided attempts to keep her from trouble. Mathilde also befriends a Hungarian doctor’s wife, whose sexuality (‘she’s a whore’, she thinks repeatedly when she first meets her) ⁣is punished by infertility. In the middle of these extremes is Mathilde who straddles elements of both worlds. ⁣
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This is a less striking book that Slimani’s earlier work, I suspect in large part because it’s based on fact. It is nonetheless a captivating story about how the choices we make shape us into who we become. ⁣
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#LeilaSlimani #TheCountryofOthers

This is written in a very different style from Leilani's other books: detached, 'told', with barely any dialogue, it feels stilted and unengaging. Issues of a mixed race marriage, feelings of being alienated within a culture, dissatisfaction and disappointment all seemed put together in a predictable and uninspiring way. Sorry: I wanted to love this but it just never came to life for me :(

The Country of Others is the first novel in a trilogy by the Prix Goncourt winning author Leila Slimani, Slimani is perhaps best known here for Lullaby, a horrifying story of how a nanny murders the children in her charge. Slimani was the first author of Moroccan heritage to win the Prix Goncourt and in The Country of Others she explores the Moroccan war of independence through the eyes of a couple, Mathilde and Amine.

Mathilde is French. She meets Amine when he is stationed in Alsace during WW2. Once the war is over she moves to Morocco where Amine takes over land left to him by his father. He is determined to make a success of it but geography is against him. The land is stony and infertile and his labours are in vain. Gradually their love for each other dwindles. Neither really understands the other's culture. Mathilde is adrift in a land where she doesn't really belong. The other french people there spurn her for being married to an Arab while the moroccans equally ignore her. Meanwhile in the background the push for independence is growing and neither Amine nor Mathilde know where they stand.

I liked this novel very much. Having a 'mixed marriage' couple at its heart means we get to see both sides of the story. It reminded me very much of The Art of Losing (L'Art de perdre) by Alice Zeniter, another Goncourt prize winner, which explores the Algerian war of independence and its aftermath. Like Zeniter, Slimani draws on her own family history and this makes these stories all the more poignant. Thanks to NetGalley and Faber for the ARC.

This is a book about the concept of otherness as much as it is a social and historical commentary on Morocco in the years before it gained independence from France.. Its also a big shift in subject matter from Franco-Moroccan author Leila Slimani.

In the Country of Others is the first in a planned trilogy about the Belhaj family, Mathilde falls in love with Amine, a Moroccan soldier fighting with the French in World War 2. They form an unlikely couple: Mathilde is tall, French and Catholic, Amine is short, Moroccan and Muslim. They marry and Mathilde moves to Morocco to set up home as a farmers wife. The novel chronicles the struggles and cultural oppression that Mathilde faces as both a woman and a foreigner, and the perilous position of women in Moroccan society. As war rages between the French Colonists and the Moroccan Nationalists, Mathilde faces her own battles. She fights against the harshness and drudgery of life on the isolated farm; the heat and dust, the loneliness, poverty and domestic violence. While the novel focuses on the extended Belhaj family, it is Aicha, Mathilde's gifted daughter, who is a stand-out character for me. She attend a Catholic girls school in the nearest town ran by an order of French nuns where as a child of a mixed marriage, she is perceived as different, as the other.

This is a fascinating story which is far more than a multi generational novel about family but is a snapshot of a country in turmoil. It educated me about Morocco's fight for independence in the 1950s, Its is written in Slimani's uncompromising style and I am really looking forward to continuing the story of the Belhaj family.