During the decade of 1990-2000, Algeria is shaken by a bloody civil war. After its end, the government forbids and criminalizes any reference to it, invoking the law of "Reconciliation." The young Fazr, whose name means Dawn, must remember her country's war of independence from France, even though she did not experience it herself.
At the same time, though a survivor of the dark decade, she is legally obliged to forget the sufferings of the civil war. Her body, a notebook full of secrets, bears the tragedy of fratricidal strife: a deep knife scar, like a horrible smile, marks her throat, and her vocal cords are destroyed. Dawn, mute for years now, has crafted from the material of dreams a language of her own and waits for the day she will regain her voice.
She can share her shocking story only with the child she carries in her belly, whom she assumes is a girl. But how can she give life when hers has been nearly taken from her? Does she have the right to bring this baby into the world and raise it in a society hostile to women, or would it be better to terminate the pregnancy and return her unborn child to Paradise?
In a country that punishes even the slightest reference to the civil war, Dawn decides to leave her life in Oran behind and return to the village of Khant Chekala, where everything began and almost ended. In the homeland that became the stage for a deadly massacre, perhaps the dead will give her answers...
"Daoud does not simply write a novel that reveals the truth, but sets the stage for the liberation of speech." Le Monde des Livres
"Daoud addresses the collective amnesia of a nation in a manner reminiscent of the therapeutic approaches of the great psychotherapist Frantz Fanon. Just as Fanon sought to lead his Algerian patients to an awareness of their dual nature, both victims and perpetrators, so too does Daoud bring readers face-to-face with raw reality." TLS
"Daoud, in an unsurpassable historical novel, brings to light the suppressed memory of a national tragedy." World Literature Today
"Daoud, knowing well that oblivion leads inevitably to the repetition of history, returns to the forgotten Algerian civil war, a dark period omitted from school textbooks." La Presse
