Changes

Yasmina Khadra (the pseudonym for Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulesshoul) has done a much better job of capturing the heartache and joy of a group of friends' teenage years than most authors aiming at that target audience do. The main five characters – the 'pitchfork', as the inseparable Jonas, Jean-Christophe, Fabrice and Simon are known, plus the stunning Emilie – are all vivid creations and really make the bookstand out. Jonas is an especially interesting narrator – he's a deeply conflicted character, likeable but capable of frustrating the reader with some poor decisions.

The Algerian War of Independence itself takes up a relatively small part of the book, but even earlier on, this is always foreshadowed. There's prejudice towards Arabs all the way through – although Jonas is lucky enough to avoid most of this, with his looks allowing him to blend in with the Europeans. Still, when the war eventually breaks outand its effects reach Rio Salado, it becomes a brutal and thrilling story, a marked change in pace from the fairly languid prose of earlier in the book.

All in all , this is extremely highly recommended and I look forward to getting my hands on some of Khadra's earlier books, which are now on order from my local library.

Further reading suggestion: For more literary fiction set in Africa, [[Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie]] comes highly recommended. If you're willing to look much further north in search of more beautiful writing, the Danish epic [[We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen]] is one of my very favourite pieces of literary fiction in recent years. You might also appreciate [[Three Strong Women by Marie N'Diaye and John Fletcher (translator)]].