Huris

Reading and talk with Kamel Daoud

For his first novel "Der Fall Meursault - eine Gegendarstellung", Kamel Daoud gave the nameless Arab from "The Stranger" by Albert Camus a face. The book was widely discussed
and translated into 30 languages. In "Huris", his new novel, we meet the young Algerian woman Aube, who experienced the civil war of the 1990s herself, as the scar on her neck reveals.
During the attack on her village, Islamists tried to slit her throat, but only her vocal cords were captured. It is not only her missing voice that now silences Aube, but also the state laws that forbid her to remember the civil war. Aube can only address her words to the daughter growing up inside her. But can she give life when it was almost snatched from her? Aube returns to her home village, where it all began, and searches for answers. With "Huris", Kamel Daoud gives Algerian women the floor and takes a stand against the still prescribed forgetting of the civil war and its horrors; translated into German by Holger Fock and Sabine Müller. Kamel Daoud has been living in exile in France since the summer of 2023 - he had to leave his native Algeria.