ABOUT MY MOTHER, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman

247pp., paperback, First English Language Edition, London, 2016

First published in 2008 in France as Sur ma mère.

As he sits at his dying mother's bedside, a son listens to his mother as she speaks about her life in post-war Fez, in a world of custom and tradition that saw her married, pregnant, and widowed by sixteen.

Moroccan novelist, essayist, critic, and poet Tahar Ben Jelloun has won the Prix Goncourt and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. He received the rank of Officier de la Légion d'honneur in 2008. His other works include The Blinding Lights of Absence, Leaving Tangier, Sand Child, and Racism Explained to My Daughter.