num_pages: 305
description: The award-winning #1 internationally bestselling new novel by the author of The Perfect Nanny--a passionate interracial love story between a Moroccan soldier who fought for France in World War II and a French woman whose fierce desire for autonomy parallels colonial Morocco's fight for independence.The world of men is just like the world of botany. In the end one species dominates another. One day the orange will win out over the lemon or vice versa and the tree will once again produce fruit that people can eat.Mathilde a spirited young Frenchwoman falls in love with Amine a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate his family farms rocky terrain Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation the harsh climate the lack of money and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. Left increasingly alone to raise her two children in a world whose rules she does not understand and with her daughter taunted at school by rich French girls for her secondhand clothes and unruly hair Mathilde goes from being reduced to a farmers wife to defying the countrys chauvinism and repressive social codes by offering medical services to the rural population.As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists Amine finds himself caught in the crossfire: in solidarity with his Moroccan workers yet also a landowner despised by the French yet married to a Frenchwoman and proud of his wifes resolve but ashamed by her refusal to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of othersespecially the women forced to live in the land of menand with this novel Lela Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation.
language: English
title: In the Country of Others
publisher: Penguin Books