In the Country of Others

＂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 farm’s 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 farmer’s wife to defying the country’s chauvinism and repressive social codes by offering medical services to the rural population＂--]cProvided by publisher.

Leila Slimani is the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny, one of The New York TimesBook Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018, and Adèle, for which she won the La Mamounia Prize. A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, she spearheaded a campaign--for which she won the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for women’s freedom--to help Moroccan women speak out, as self-declared outlaws, against their country’s ＂unfair and obsolete laws.＂ She is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture and was ranked #2 on Vanity Fair France’s annual list of The Fifty Most Influential French People in the World. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she now lives in Paris with her French husband and their two young children.