APRIL 2021 - AudioFile
Narrator Peter Ganim dramatizes the choices facing Khalil, a young man who has been radicalized by Islamic extremists in Europe. The descendant of Moroccan immigrants in Belgium, he fails in his quest to detonate a suicide vest. Ganim maximizes the internal conflict that runs through Khalil's life on the run after his failure. He presents Khalil in a sympathetic light as he reveals the young man’s internal complexity. Ganim sounds grave, contemplative, and slightly scared as Khalil is hunted by the police and the extremists. The narration captures the growing suspense. Ganim is well known for his expertise in presenting stories from the Arab world, and once again he shines. M.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
09/14/2020
Algerian writer Khadra (What the Day Owes the Night) chronicles a young man’s involvement in terrorism, beginning with an account of the November 2015 Paris attacks. Narrator Khalil, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, follows his childhood friend Driss into a Muslim fundamentalist group known as the Fraternal Solidarity Association. Together they are assigned to be part of a group of suicide bombers who will target the Stade de France in Paris during a soccer game, bent on transforming the event into one of “global mourning.” By weaving real events into Khalil’s story, With a narrative both intimate and broad, Khadra attempts to show the ways the disenfranchised and marginalized are seduced into violent fundamentalism, but much of this comes off as sketchy sociology. When Khalil’s suicide vest fails to detonate, he goes into hiding and relies on friends and family to shield him from his co-conspirators while lying to them about his involvement in the bombings. After he finally reconnects with the “brotherhood,” Khalil must decide where his loyalties lie: with those he loves or with his mission with the terrorists. The narrator functions as a cipher for a series of conversations about Muslim identity and racism in relation to the stigma of Islamic terrorism, which are by turns illuminating and pedantic. In the end, Khadra’s difficult story about one man’s search for meaning comes up short. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
"Direct and irresistible . . . This novel is both timely and, sadly, timeless. In examining the anatomy of radicalism, Khadra shows that all forms of extremism, whether political, religious or otherwise, stem from the same source: a refusal to see things from an opposing point of view. For Khalil and many others who feel called to commit atrocities in the name of a higher cause, the outcome is only tragedy."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Khadra . . . skillfully shows how someone like Khalil can be turned into a terrorist from a young age. With Khalil's fate—and those of countless potential victims—perpetually hanging in the balance, the book becomes a gripping existential inquiry that earns the author comparisons with Camus. An exciting work of fiction rooted in docu-like reality."
—Kirkus
"Award-winning Yasmina Khadra has penned another fast-paced, thought-provoking and immersive story within a ravishing novel. Khalil tackles the blurry moral edges of agency, right and wrong, guilt, as well as coming to terms with choices and mistakes. Can control of one’s life ever be regained once it has set on a seemingly irreversible course? There is a degree of unsettling intimacy in Khalil’s writing."
—Asian Review of Books
"[Khadra] succeeds . . . in addressing the statelessness many first generations feel, in which neither conformity nor diversity is rewarded. The systemic contempt of these communities erodes any possibility of hope, and this is a form of violence too."
—The Daily Beast
Library Journal
06/01/2020
Author of The Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, both short-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Khadra here introduces us to Belgian Moroccan Khalil, whose suicide vest fails to detonate as he stands outside the Stade de France in November 2015. He shimmies into the crowd and remains mum and glum about his failure, then learns that his ISIS affiliate had other plans for him all along. A French best seller.
APRIL 2021 - AudioFile
Narrator Peter Ganim dramatizes the choices facing Khalil, a young man who has been radicalized by Islamic extremists in Europe. The descendant of Moroccan immigrants in Belgium, he fails in his quest to detonate a suicide vest. Ganim maximizes the internal conflict that runs through Khalil's life on the run after his failure. He presents Khalil in a sympathetic light as he reveals the young man’s internal complexity. Ganim sounds grave, contemplative, and slightly scared as Khalil is hunted by the police and the extremists. The narration captures the growing suspense. Ganim is well known for his expertise in presenting stories from the Arab world, and once again he shines. M.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-08-19
After his suicide mission in Paris as part of the terrorist attacks of 2015 goes awry, a young Belgian named Kahlil suffers through dark nights of the soul back home.
On assignment from an Islamic State group affiliate, Khalil and a childhood friend were to have taken part in a massacre at the Stade de France. But while the friend blew himself up outside the French stadium, Khalil's vest failed to ignite, forcing him to return to his poor Brussels neighborhood, where neither his Moroccan-rooted family nor most of his friends know of his extremist bent. His emir, with whom he "grew up in the same gutter," acknowledges that Khalil was mistakenly given a defective suicide vest. But even after he's given another bombing mission, the increasingly paranoid Khalil is punished by the feeling that his cohorts think he lost his nerve the first time. Overcome by anger, guilt, and then grief over the shocking death of the only family member he cares about, he becomes physically ill. You wouldn't expect to care about a character whose life's purpose is to murder a large number of people. But Khalil, who tells his story with a mixture of punkish attitude and intellectual snobbery, is so utterly without meaningful human connection that it's hard not to feel a measure of sympathy. Khadra, an Algerian author based in France who writes under his wife's name (he adopted it while in the Algerian army to avoid military censorship), skillfully shows how someone like Khalil can be turned into a terrorist from a young age. With Khalil's fate—and those of countless potential victims—perpetually hanging in the balance, the book becomes a gripping existential inquiry that earns the author comparisons with Camus.
An exciting work of fiction rooted in docu-like reality.
