La blanche

Casablanca, 1992. In a white Art Deco villa, a man is pushed down the marble staircase to his death. His murder, never truly explained, fractures a family, a way of life, and the minds of both his wife and his daughter. To survive, his nine-year-old granddaughter carefully suppresses her memories until twenty years later, when her life is once more ripped apart, this time by a disastrous love affair. Returning to Casablanca, she relives the tragedy of her grandfather's murder and the events surrounding it. But now she sees it all not simply through the eyes of an innocent child, but with an adult's awareness that things - and people - might not always be quite as they seem.

In a beautifully constructed first-person narrative that shifts in time and place, young French-Moroccan writer Ma?-Do Hamisultane weaves a delicate web of fact and fiction. Her prose - sometimes luminous, often powerfully cinematographic - has drawn comparisons with Marguerite Duras, one of France's most famous novelists and experimental film-makers.