“Gripping, vivid, and extremely engaging. Mhani Alaoui is a gifted novelist; she writes with honesty, simplicity and grace.” — Mustapha Fahmi, University of Quebec, Chicoutimi
The House on Butterfly Street
In a country where the precarious rights of women and children can be reversed in an instant, legacies of enslavement and quiet resistance still reverberate across time.
Present-day Casablanca, Morocco: Nadine Alam, a physician by training and housewife by choice, has reached her hour of reckoning. Her marriage has broken down, her teenage daughter Al has retreated into silence, and now her young housekeeper Ghalia has disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
One morning, Nadine receives an envelope from an unidentified sender. Inside it is a newspaper clipping, an article about a single mother and her newborn child, a boy named Noor—typically a name given to girls, meaning light. Nadine’s country is one where single mothers and children born out of wedlock are considered pariahs, outside the protection of the law. Why would a journalist disclose the child’s name? And why was she sent this clipping? Nadine embarks on a search that takes her into a Casablanca she barely knew existed, into her own family’s history and her country’s past, in which her family is entwined.
A vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a Casablanca household.
Aya Dane
Aya Dane creates mixed media paintings and writes a diary in her studio above a strange, old Cambridge townhouse. There she lives alone, having left her childhood home in Tangiers. Though she has carved a name for herself in the art world, she allows herself just one close relationship, to an intimate companion named David.
One day, Aya receives a letter from a powerful, enigmatic patron, an invitation to submit her ultimate work to his collection. If he deems it worthy, he promises, her art will live on forever. Aya finds herself unable to resist the mysterious invitation, and challenge.
But as she begins to work on the commissioned painting, from her top-floor perch, the streets of Tangiers reappear to her. Their white-and-blue walls, purple bougainvillea, sweetness and sorrow bring back to life people and events she thought she’d left behind. Aya becomes haunted by forgotten scenes, only to discover that she herself is being painted, on a canvas from which it seems impossible to escape…
Dreams of Maryam Tair:
Blue Boots and Orange Blossoms
Outside of time, the legendary queen Sheherazade tells a little girl a story that has happened, and is yet to happen. Dreams of Maryam Tair brings readers to a Casablanca of myth and metaphor, of curses, witches, djinns and demons. But it is also a very present-day Casablanca: a raw, pitiless landscape of crumbling urbanism and rusty ports, of bureaucrats and student revolts, and of a deep human solitude. During the Casablanca Bread Riots of 1981, a child is born to a mother surveilled and detained. She is born with the scent of orange blossoms and a body filled with pain. They call her Maryam Tair. A special, singular child, she is prophesized to carry three perfect gifts--and one relentless curse...