On the run from dictators, murderers and the Vatican — the best new thrillers. Including Saïd Khatibi’s vivid Arab noir, Elizabeth Heider’s tale of secrets and lies in Naples and a first outing for Maya Landry, AC Glass’s new protagonist. Adam LeBor in the FT March 2026. "The Arab noir renaissance deserves more attention. Its writers conjure up engrossing characters while shining a brilliant, unyielding light on sloth and corruption across the Middle East. As the Markaz Review, an online journal focused on arts from the Middle East, notes, Arab noir adapts to local realities. “In these works the detective is often powerless, the crime is rarely cleanly solved, and justice, if it comes at all, arrives twisted or incomplete.” Saïd Khatibi’s award-winning The End of the Sahara (Bitter Lemon Press £10.99) unfolds in a small desert town in Algeria in 1988 — just before the state massacred hundreds of demonstrators. A shepherd discovers the dead body of Zakia Zaghouani, the singer at the Sahara Hotel. Her room contains a letter addressed to Bachir, her lover, who is swiftly arrested and waterboarded. The torture described is routine, almost unremarkable, as Khatibi layers the story with vivid detail. An overcrowded sweatbox prison cell is filled with a “rotten stench that mingled with the smell of sweat and feet”, while the prisoners mutter and scream. But Bachir vehemently denies killing Zakia — and she was feeding information to the local police inspector about the nightclub’s clientele. The story is told through multiple viewpoints, including Bachir, Hamid, a corrupt police officer and Noura, Bachir’s determined lawyer. Alexander Elinson’s translation from the Arabic feels lively and authentic. Khatibi handles each character with care and skill, unpeeling their personal stories, their web of connections and the grim reality of life in a one-party dictatorship.---Financial Times Best Thrillers
“The killing of an Algerian singer in 1988 kicks off Saïd Khatibi’s intricate novel “The End of the Sahara” (Bitter Lemon, 330 pages, $17.95). Zakia Zaghouani, 24, had been employed at the Sahara Hotel, a tourist destination in an unnamed Algerian city. Her battered body is found outside town by a shepherd named Achour Hadeeri, one of several characters who alternately narrate this dense tale translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson. Another is Inspector Hamid, a much-feared police chief nicknamed the Scorpion. Hamid had benefited from confidential information Zakia fed him about the wealthy patrons who flocked to see her at the Sahara. Was she murdered by one of the Scorpion’s enemies as a warning to him? Suspicion also falls on the married owner of the Sahara, who was secretly in love with Zakia, and the dead woman’s boyfriend, who is arrested on evidence of a threatening letter supposedly written by him. The book’s characters relate their stories in discrete sections that peel back time, revealing shocking secrets and meriting re-evaluation. The collective melodrama plays out against a background of deteriorating social conditions and political unrest. Food, water and medicine grow scarce, and everyone seems constrained by fate and history. “My existence,” concludes a minor figure who proves to be anything but insignificant, “was nothing more than a drawing in the sand obliterated by the wind.” Mr. Khatibi’s book is cinematic, kaleidoscopic and tragic—a splendid achievement”.---Wall Street Journal
Travel to Italy and Algeria in these two brilliant, translated mysteries--NPR Fresh Air
“I've always loved mystery novels that take me inside different cultures. While lots of English language crime writers are good at evoking other lands — think of Philip Kerr's Nazi Berlin or Cara Black's Paris — the richest portraits come to us in translations of books by homegrown writers. These have the revelatory tang you get when novelists know their culture from the inside.
As it happens, two terrific novels of this kind have just come out from Bitter Lemon Press, a small London publisher that specializes in translated mysteries. These new books could hardly be less alike, except for one thing: Each is, in its unconventional way, quite brilliant.
The End of the Sahara is a kaleidoscopic murder mystery by the Algerian writer Saïd Khatibi, a rising star who just won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Superbly translated by Alexander E. Elinson, the book's set in a provincial city on the edge of the Sahara in 1988 Algeria, a troubled time when the ruling socialist government has clearly failed. But you don't need to know Algerian history to get sucked in by the plot, which centers on the murder of Zakia Zaghouani, a nightclub singer at a local hotel called The Sahara. Burning with urgency, the story is told by a big cast of characters who all speak to us in first person. There's Ibrahim, a college grad who's been reduced to dealing in illegal videos. There's the hotel owner, Maimoun, a shifty wheeler-dealer who fancied Zakia. There's Zakia's fiancé, Bachir, a decent guy found with blood on his shirt. He's the top suspect of Inspector Hamid, a corrupt, womanizing cop who also fancied Zakia. Bachir's represented by his cousin Noura, a good-hearted lawyer who's constantly derided for reaching the age of 30 without a husband. As we move from suspect to suspect, Khatibi not only makes us feel the textures of these characters' everyday lives — the looks and smells, the food shortages and emerging Islamist militancy — but he deftly unveils how they are all are trapped together in a spiderweb of lies and betrayal that began in the past. Using 1988 Algeria as a mirror for present-day Algeria, Khatibi gives us an X-ray of an entire social structure. Even as we learn who killed Zakia, we realize that no one escapes the bone-deep misogyny that underlies her murder and the repressive, post-colonial politics that leave Algerians spinning in circles. As one character thinks bitterly, "It was as if this country's history just repeats itself rather than moving forward…"
Deliciously translated by Gregory Dowling, An Enigma by the Sea starts off like a gently acerbic comedy of manners, as these self-absorbed characters go about killing time — chatting, flirting, bickering, having tea. Then suddenly the story shifts. Three residents inexplicably disappear. Could they have been murdered? Here? The question unleashes the sleuthing instincts of their neighbor, Signor Monforti, a pessimistic depressive who's a born detective: He spends his life scrutinizing every single thing for clues to impending disaster. Masters of the light fantastic, Fruttero and Lucentini roll out their mystery with the slyest of touches, weaving discussions of the Greek cynics and the nature of depression into their droll evocation of a gray, chilly off-season resort with its wind storms and dire pizzerias. If Khatibi shows us characters caught in the tragic flames of history, Fruttero and Lucentini look at human folly with a cool, almost ancient amusement at what strange, funny creatures we all are.” --NPR Fresh Air-- John Powers
“Original, exceptional, engaging, deftly crafted, "The End of the Sahara" by Said Khatibi is the story of how on an early autumn morning in 1988, on the outskirts of an unnamed Algerian city, a shepherd stumbles upon the lifeless body of Zaza Zaghouani, a stunning nightclub singer who left her hometown seeking a brighter future. Showcasing Said Khatibi's genuinely compelling and narrative-driven storytelling style, "The End of the Sahara" is a singularly riveting suspense thriller of a read from start to finish. Unreservedly recommended for personal reading lists and community library Historical Murder Mystery collections.”.---MBR (Midwestern Book Review)
“Translated by Alexander E Elinson — In The End of the Sahara, a murder mystery by Saïd Khatabi, the story of who killed Algerian nightclub singer Zakia Zaghouani is slowly turned and examined from all sides like a colourfully refracting glass ball. This is the first time we’ve reviewed Algerian crime fiction on the site, and The End of the Sahara may well be the first Algerian crime novel you’ve come across. The story takes place in an unnamed Algerian city near the desert only about 25 years after independence, which followed on years of bloody conflict that left scars and disarray. The book opens in the days leading up to the October 1988 riots. Rumours of an impending ‘merchants’ strike’ and shortages of food, medicines and other necessities add fuel to the fires of unrest.
Investigating Zaza’s death is complicated. In fact, any number of people seem to have had at least some motive for the crime, and their private lives and blood relationships are hopelessly entangled. You’ll want to bookmark the list of major and minor characters at the back of the text. Khatibi assembles an intriguing cast of characters. Ibrahim, whose desultory management of a video store produces little income, is worried that his constant shortage of funds won’t cover the cost of staying out of the military. Inspector Hamid, tends to throw people in jail and ask questions later, if at all. Maimoun owns the Sahara Hotel, the end of which is forecast in the book’s title, and believes Zaza was prepared to marry him. Kamal, the hotel’s receptionist, is the eyes and ears of the entire enterprise. And, most luckless of all, Bachir Labtam also expected to marry Zaza if and when his mother’s concerns about a stable future could be satisfied. He is immediately arrested as the chief suspect soon after Zaza’s body is found, despite the lack of evidence against him.
Among the women, Zaza herself has been playing a complicated game, pitting one man’s desires against another’s and spying for both her employer and the police. Zaza’s dogged mother Halima wants her daughter’s killer brought to justice, and rails against the inspector’s slow progress. Noura Arkoub, Bachir’s cousin, is his defence lawyer and is investigating the crime herself. She’s puzzled and disappointed that men don’t find her more attractive. Safia Bechiche, also a singer, is Zaza’s rival at the Sahara. The various short scenes in the novel rotate among these and a few other characters’ points of view. From this approach, you gradually assemble a well-rounded picture of the community, with all its ambiguities and uncertainties. That and the strong sense of place are what stand out most about this novel. I did consult the list of characters at the end rather frequently and experienced a little momentary confusion here and there, in part because some of their motives and actions are deliberately obtuse. Misogyny is near-universal among the novel’s men, and most of the women have suffered from the behaviour of the men in their lives. Even polygamy, legal for men under Islamic law, was tolerated. Yet, these are strong women. Their power may be behind the scenes, but it is definitely there, despite the attempts to erase it.
Khatabi has created a cultural mosaic – a brilliant picture of Algerian society at a particular point in time. The characters have secrets and suspicions, they have betrayed each other from time to time and they seem intent on settling old or even new scores. As many of them say, their world is ‘dog eat dog.’ The economic conditions are desperate. Only Maimoun appears to have sufficient capital, thanks in no small part to his lucrative black-market operations. The police detective Hamid should be a solid character, but he’s not nearly as sharp as he needs to be. Reading a novel in translation can be an act of faith, particularly in a language like Arabic where many words have multiple meanings. And there is a profusion of dialects and colloquialisms. The translator of this novel, Alexander Elison, is an experienced fiction translator. While the text is probably correct in a literal sense, I couldn’t help wonder whether any translation could reflect all the nuances and connotations of the original. Saïd Khatibi, who is also a travel writer, translator, and journalist, grew up in Algeria. He has written several prize-winning novels and, in 2023, won the Sheikh Zahed Book Award in the Young Author category for The End of the Sahara.---CrimeFictionLover
Read our interview with author Saïd Khatibi here.
LARB: “A polyphonic tapestry, weaving together multiple perspectives. The technique reinforces the conclusion that no single story can fully account for a life, because lives are embedded in a shared web of legal codes, family pressures, and implicit social contracts. Private memory and public rumor, personal reflection and collective judgment, all accumulate to create a rich, textured, and deeply ambivalent portrait of a community.”
“THE DESERT ROMANCE that E. M. Hull’s 1919 novel The Sheik and its 1921 film adaptation starring Rudolph Valentino gave the Western imagination was a fantasy of liberation—a lawless space where passion could override convention and the Arab sheikh embodied a masculinity undomesticated by civilization. Saïd Khatibi’s 2022 novel The End of the Sahara, newly translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson, returns this fantasy to its geographical origin only to dismantle it piece by piece. In Khatibi’s Algeria, the desert offers no theater for transcendence. It is a landscape littered with unfulfilled dreams—a place where a body can be found and a life erased without ceremony. Khatibi’s book, the first Algerian crime novel translated from Arabic by Bitter Lemon Press, adopts the tropes of detective fiction only to set them aside, conducting not an investigation but an autopsy of a society on the brink of upheaval.Set in the months before Algeria’s bloody 1988 October Riots—a pivotal uprising of economic and political protest against a corrupt, authoritarian, patriarchal state—the novel unfolds in a provincial town where the lives of a disparate group of characters intersect. When the body of a young woman is discovered in the desert, Inspector Hamid is called in to investigate. The victim, we learn, was known to some as Zakia, but she lived and worked under another name, Zaza, as a singer at the Sahara Hotel. Hamid methodically questions those who knew her—a video store owner, a factory accountant with literary aspirations, the hotel staff—but the novel quickly shifts its focus away from the whodunit mechanics of the genre. The investigation does not so much conclude as recede, gradually displaced by the voices of characters whose memories and reflections come to occupy the space where clues and alibis might otherwise appear. The question is not simply who killed Zaza but how the social, legal, and economic conditions of her world conspired to create the circumstances of her life and, ultimately, her death. The murder becomes less a central mystery than a prism, refracting the complex forces that shape love, marriage, gender, and authority in contemporary Algeria.
Khatibi structures his narrative as a polyphonic tapestry, weaving together multiple perspectives. The technique reinforces the conclusion that no single story can fully account for a life, because lives are embedded in a shared web of legal codes, family pressures, and implicit social contracts. Private memory and public rumor, personal reflection and collective judgment, all accumulate to create a rich, textured, and deeply ambivalent portrait of a community. At the heart of this web is Ibrahim, who studied translation but, unable to find a suitable job, ended up borrowing money to start a video shop. His education and business place him at the intersection of global culture and local experience. Among the films he circulates is The Sheik; his copy of Hull’s novel, discovered at a pavement stall, still bears a municipal library’s faded stamp—mute testament to a state whose institutions leak into the informal economy. Ibrahim’s fascination with The Sheik becomes one of the novel’s most potent motifs. As the narrative moves through the inner lives of its characters, the story of the desert romance reappears, offering an ironic counterpoint to the constrained realities they inhabit. It is a fantasy that haunts their imaginations, a measure of the gulf between romantic ideal and lived experience. Yet Khatibi’s engagement with The Sheik begins before Ibrahim enters. The End of the Sahara opens with a line adapted from Hull’s 1925 sequel The Sons of the Sheik, in which Ahmed ben Hassan—a.k.a. the little Sheik—confronts the limits of desire. Raised between European and Arab culture, he cannot pursue his love for Yasmin, an Arab dancing girl, because tribal law forbids it. “He realized that his own brief romance was over,” Hull writes, “that he was outside and beyond this desert drama.” By using this line as an epigraph, Khatibi performs a striking inversion, invoking the most famous desert romance only to reverse its basic premise. Hull’s The Sheik belongs to a colonial fantasy tradition in which the desert, the domain of tribal leaders and sheikhs, is imagined as a space promising the liberation of passion, while Arab women appear largely as submissive figures or objects of male desire. Khatibi reverses this perspective, focusing instead on ordinary Algerians navigating precarious lives and desire shaped by law, reputation, and economic constraint.
The Algerian Family Code of 1984 forms the legal bedrock of Khatibi’s characters’ personal struggles. By formalizing male guardianship in matters of marriage and divorce, the code institutionalized patriarchal authority, codifying inequalities long shaped by social practice. This tension is embodied in Hassina, a brilliant and cynical Marxist lawyer known as much for her corruption as for her activism, defending women caught in the code’s trap while navigating her own complicated life. The law’s influence, however, is not always so explicit. It seeps into the everyday through figures like the feminist lawyer Noura’s father, who embodies a blend of formal law and informal custom. He abandoned his first wife to enter a series of unstable marriages, one annulled because of the wife’s failure to conceive, another arranged when the woman was underage and left legally unregistered. These histories shape Noura’s experience even as she achieves professional success as a lawyer—a success her mother sarcastically acknowledges by calling her “the Godmother of Divorced Women.”
Noura’s own life illustrates how social law’s shadow extends beyond the courtroom. She begins a tender, hesitant relationship with Ibrahim, yet neither of them seriously considers marriage. It is not a lack of affection that holds them back but the customary, deeply internalized social barriers they both recognize. Ibrahim’s mother would never approve of a son marrying an independent woman who is also older than him. The law, in this case, doesn’t need to intervene; its patriarchal logic has already been absorbed into the fabric of family expectation, making a formal union unthinkable from the start. At Ibrahim’s suggestion, Noura rewatches The Sheik, admiring Valentino’s charisma while instinctively rejecting his coercion of the heroine. This internal conflict mirrors her own delicate negotiation: she is drawn to passion but refuses patriarchal dominance, seeking an autonomy that the world she inhabits is not structured to allow.
The men in Khatibi’s world discover that their freedoms are also circumscribed, though in different ways. Bachir, a factory accountant who dreams of becoming a writer, nurses a hesitant, nostalgic love for the murdered Zaza. At one point, he compares himself to Valentino’s heroic desert prince, imagining he once “stole Zakia’s heart.” The fantasy is painfully ironic, highlighting his own paralysis. Where the sheikh acts boldly, Bachir hesitates, constrained by his mother’s disapproval and Zaza’s socially scrutinized profession. Kamal, an elegant and charismatic hotel receptionist, experiences a different form of limitation. Upon learning that Noura is the cousin of a close friend, he withdraws, subordinating personal longing to the unwritten codes of male loyalty. Whereas Bachir’s restraint stems from fear and social judgment, Kamal’s reflects allegiance and the careful negotiation of relationships within his social world.
Yet even within these constraints, moments of genuine, transformative feeling emerge. Kamal’s relationship with Hassina offers one of the novel’s rare hints of personal evolution. Relatively free from familial ties—an orphan raised by his sister, whose influence never quite equaled that of a mother—Kamal initially embodies a familiar posture of masculine conquest, his affairs not lasting more than “a day or two.” Hassina, with her fierce independence and political convictions, disrupts this pattern entirely. She refuses the submissive role his past relationships have assumed. Kamal is irritated by her career and her outspokenness, yet their intimacy unsettles his certainties. When he quits smoking hashish to please her, a small but significant act, we witness a reluctant but genuine openness to change. He remains unsure if he truly loves her, but even this uncertainty marks a departure from his former certainties, a subtle emotional shift suggesting that desire, however constrained, can still carve out space for growth. If Kamal and Hassina suggest that desire can still subsist within strict parameters, the novel’s most marginal figure tests that possibility’s limits. Ibrahim recalls that Hull’s heroine, Diana, is something of a transgender figure—a tomboy whose masculinity is, in the colonial romance, ultimately subsumed into heterosexual love. The description resonates with Fouzi, the coachman who, like the murdered Zaza, appears only through others’ descriptions. Understood as intersex, Fouzi occupies a position neither law nor custom can categorize. Never granted narrative voice, he exists on the margins. Yet Fouzi is not merely passive. In wearing kohl and removing body hair, small acts of self-fashioning, he embraces an identity the world refuses to acknowledge—measures of resistance against erasure. Fouzi’s silence powerfully dramatizes the limits of legal and social recognition, yet in denying him narrative voice, Khatibi risks making him an emblem of marginalization rather than a fully realized presence—raising the question of whether critique can inadvertently replicate the exclusion it condemns.
Where Diana’s gender nonconformity was a prelude to romance, Fouzi’s body admits no such resolution. He is left without a partner, mocked by other men, and discarded by his own sisters. If Diana’s story reassures us that deviant bodies can be folded into normative love, Fouzi’s silence suggests otherwise: some bodies remain illegible to law and custom, but illegibility does not mean nonexistence. His marginal position, maintained through wordless self-assertion, exposes both their limits and their violence.
This question of whether critique can avoid replicating the exclusion it documents finds one kind of answer in Khatibi’s earlier work, where marginalized figures speak more directly. This investment in marginalized bodies extends beyond Fouzi, reaching back to such figures as the masculinized Sufi Lalla Fatma and the cross-dressing Isabelle Eberhardt in Khatibi’s earlier Forty Years Waiting for Isabelle (2017). These characters form a kind of historical archive of unruly bodies—figures who live on the margins of normative masculinity and femininity and resist easy categorization within colonial or postcolonial frameworks. Lalla Fatma, in particular, complicates the colonial imaginary of passive Arab femininity that Hull’s novels helped cement. She appears not as an object of the colonial gaze but as a subject who actively negotiates and challenges social norms, reminding readers that the desert societies imagined in texts like The Sheik already contained women whose authority and autonomy exceeded the bounds of European fantasy. Nonetheless, for a novel so insistent that love cannot transcend constraint, The End of the Sahara harbors its own longing for transcendence. The tenderness between Kamal and Hassina, and Bachir’s memories—these themes suggest that desire reaches beyond boundaries. Yet the novel never decides whether this aspiration marks a genuine possibility or a persistent illusion. Khatibi’s critique leaves little room for the consolations it seems to want to offer. The result is emotional austerity: we see that intimacy matters but not what flourishing might look like. This may be the point—fantasy dismantled—but it leaves diagnosis where we might have wished for hope.
The murder is solved in a scene where lovers, criminals, and conspirators gather, their conflicts surfacing into revelation. No lone culprit, no innocent bystander—guilt and desire circulate among them all. What remains is the persistent effort to find intimacy within visible and invisible rules. The desert romance returns as its opposite—a reminder that love is always shaped by law, history, and custom. Yet Khatibi’s achievement is not merely negation. He transforms the desert into a mirror—a space where desire confronts its limitations, and the dream of escape gives way to the more difficult work of trying to live, and love, within it.”----Los Angeles Review of Books LARB
The End of the Sahara by Said Khatibi, translated from Arabic by Alexander Elinson, selected as one of '10 Noir Novels to Kill For' by The Markaz Review. "The novel highlights the enduring scars of gender-based violence, historical and contemporary, while showcasing resilient, resourceful women who drive the narrative forward. From mothers protecting their families to fiery young lawyers seeking justice, the female characters deliver some of the story’s most unforgettable moments, with shared wit and incisive dialogue."—Markaz Review
“Lounge singer Zakia Zaghouani is murdered in a politically unstable Algerian city in the late 1980s in this intricate mystery from Khatibi (Sarajevo Firewood). When a shepherd discovers Zakia’s body in a meadow, it sparks a police investigation led by Inspector Hamid, whose home life is marred by his crumbling marriage and strained relationships with extended family. Hamid quickly identifies Zakia’s troubled lover, Bachir Labtam, as the primary suspect, prompting Bachir’s cousin, lawyer Noura Arkoub, to launch an effort to clear his name. Other characters—including Ibrahim Derras, a down-on-his-luck video store owner and friend of Bachir’s, and Maimoun Belassal, operator of the Sahara Hotel, where Zakia worked—soon get roped into the investigation, sharing narration duties as the truth behind Zakia’s death comes to light. Meanwhile, political tensions simmer in the background, culminating with a fictionalization of the violent 1988 “Black October” protests against Algeria’s ruling party. While the pace occasionally bogs down under the weight of the sprawling cast, elegant prose and a keen sense of place help bring the narrative to life. It’s a solid whodunit that doubles as a captivating look at a country in transition. “ Publishers Weekly
KIRKUS STARRED REVIEW In the fall of 1988, shortly before the outbreak of mass youth riots in Algeria over unemployment and a lack of basic goods, a town’s collective anger over the murder of a nightclub singer reflects what’s to come.
The body of Zakia Zaghouani, the Sahara Hotel’s popular, alluring attraction, is found at a time when shortages of food and water and the scarcity of coffee and baby formula have made life intolerable for many. “Sometimes, entire families clamorously reached out their hands to people who might give them something. This city has become the capital of beggars.” The murder investigation is in the hands of an incompetent inspector who is all too happy to have the independent Zaza’s former (and possibly reunited) lover thrown in prison based on no real evidence. Teeming with resentments and jealousies involving Zaza, the novel is narrated by the interconnected and sometimes related characters in rotation. The owner of the hotel, Zaza’s boss, wanted to marry her. The young female singer who took her place may have wanted that badly enough to kill her. Says the shifty Ibrahim, who deals drugs and porn from his video shop, “‘She probably left her lover, so he killed her.’ (I, too, had almost strangled a previous girlfriend).” Though suspects abound, the novel’s aura of mystery is created less by Zaza’s killing than by the painful aftereffects of Algeria’s war for independence (the ghosts of the disappeared float about) and the withholding of secrets revealed by the October protests. Marked by dark humor and darker truths, this novel illuminates a lightly documented chapter of Algeria’s past.An absorbing novel that should broaden Khatibi’s following.----Kirkus STARRED REVIEW
"Suspicions, shady secrets, surprising connections and simmering social unrest in 1980s Algeria — this meaty literary murder mystery throngs with thought-provoking might." Taking place across the forty days that preceded Algeria’s 1988 October Riots, when thousands of young people protested the country’s one-party political system, Saïd Khatibi’s The End of the Sahara is sure to grip fans of thoughtful crime while also satisfying readers who are into pacey literary fiction with socio-political bite. At the heart of the novel is the murder of Zakia, a singer who performed at the Sahara Hotel where she’d “been like a freshwater spring thirsty patrons flocked to because of her enchanting voice and suggestive dancing”. Initially, the investigating inspector wonders whether Zakia’s murder might be meant as a message for him — she’d been his eyes and ears in the nightclub, but soon suspicion falls on Zakia’s lover, whose lawyer cousin begins her own investigation to uncover the truth. Through the parallel investigations and the testimonies of many friends, associates and family members, the suspect net grows ever wider, with multiple people having motive to murder her. Located close to the desert, the Sahara Hotel serves as the stage for a diverse cast of players who all voice this cleverly twisting story. In the author’s words, the hotel also “stands in for Algeria, and Algeria for all countries that cultivate cultural amnesia and indifference to others”. As a result, The End of the Sahara amounts to a crime thriller with tremendous emotional and political resonance.--LoveReading
The End of the Sahara is the second novel on this list to take place in Algeria during the tumultuous late 1980s. In Khatibi’s moody masterpiece, a nightclub singer has been found murdered, perplexing a wide range of lovers, friends, enemies, and others drawn into her magnetic orbit, and in possession of her deadly secrets. Evocative, brooding, and perfectly hard-boiled!--- CrimeReads
The body of a night club singer is found in waste land outside a desert town a long way south of Algiers. It’s 1988 and Algeria has become an unruly country since de-colonisation; the government is Socialist in name but conditions for ordinary people are dire. Food and medicines are in short supply, the taps run dry, there are power cuts. Everything costs too much and there is no work. No legitimate work, that is. People lower their sights, do whatever presents itself; there is a miasma of easy corruption in this country that is ostensibly secular but where one prays to God to be lenient for small sins. Nevertheless, as one character says: life here is a case of dog eat dog. Which is how a respectable Arab girl came to be singing in a night club under an assumed name in order to escape her own family who would incarcerate her as a whore.
Zaza was a beauty, a luscious draw for the Sahara Hotel, where she also acted as a spy for her employer, keeping an eye on the staff, the customers and the police at the same time that she was double-dealing with the police chief himself who needed to know what was brewing at the hotel, a hotbed of intrigue. It’s this man who was to head the investigation into Zaza’s murder: a shady character faced not only with a multitude of suspects, but a suspect himself.
Zaza had spread her net wide. Apart from her obvious protectors, there was her fiancé: an open secret, an accountant and a good man. There was Ibrahim, a friend, who sold DVDs and videos (adult items under the counter); there was Kamal the chic receptionist at the Sahara who lusted after her and was made miserable in the face of her arrogance; there was the musician who resented her celebrity…. All were devastated by her death.
Her lovers’ wives hated her, but among women of her own age and class, she was a role model, although a risky one. Breaking free of the old patriarchism which persisted under the new regime, she had turned the system on its head to use men as they had used women for centuries. She lived a charmed and charming life but she relished power and money and she forgot to look behind her.
Although the murder of Zaza and the subsequent inquiry are the hub of this novel, there are subplots involving those connected with her, each fighting his or her own corner with their own problems and ploys, trifling or desperate. There is forgery of certificates and correspondence, blackmail and betrayal, and all carried on under the cloak of everyday living. The reader is spellbound, drawn into this other world where nothing is quite as it appears, where euphemisms abound in juxtaposition with crude intimacies; where love affairs are conducted by men with extraordinary delicacy, the same men who can suddenly erupt into fits of violent rage, spitting obscenities. Repression is rife. The West has psychiatrists and counsellors; Algeria has to make do with faith healers.
One is left with an uneasy sense of the reality of a country in chaos: the old Arab world in collision with Western versions of democracy, and no one having any idea how to deal with it except to revolt. The end of the Sahara was civil war. …certainly a novel that inspires the reader to seek out more from this perceptive author.” ---SHOTS Magazine
