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Slimani draws on her family's history for a sprawling tale of 1960s Morocco, the second installment in a planned trilogy (after In the Country of Others). The central couple, Amine Belhaj and his French wife, Mathilde, are now middle-aged and unexpectedly prosperous, the family farm having done surprisingly well. Their bookish daughter, Aicha, is studying medicine in France, while their son, Selim, is less ambitious, spending his days swimming in the Belhajs' swimming pool­--an unheard-of luxury for the time and place--and embarking on an incestuous affair with his aunt, the depressed and beautiful Selma. In the background, following the country's recent independence from France, Moroccan people struggle with disillusionment. The new king, Hassan II, whose reign is marked by state violence, is a constant presence. In an early chapter, Amine, gratified by the sovereign's interest in agriculture, hangs a framed photograph of Hassan II in his office. Later, Aicha's future husband, Mehdi, fatefully skips the king's 42nd birthday party, during which there's a coup attempt. Though the surfeit of characters and vertiginous plot points tend to throttle the momentum, Slimani continues to prove herself a powerful writer by delivering a convicing and immersive depiction of a complicated era in Morocco's history. It's an accomplished portrait of a time and place, though it comes at the expense of a fully realized family saga. (June)

Growing pains plague an interracial family and its recently decolonized nation. Second in a trilogy inspired by her own ancestry, following In the Country of Others (2021), Franco-Moroccan author Slimani's latest begins in 1968, during Morocco's violent, tumultuous "years of lead." The rocky Meknes acreage where Amine Belhaj and his Alsatian-born wife, Mathilde, began their life together has become a thriving farm, but their marriage is far from happy; Amine cheats flagrantly and with abandon, while Mathilde worries she's wasted her youth thanklessly caring for others. The couple now routinely socializes with the region's remaining French bourgeoisie, who are eager to prove that "colonization had never been anything more than a misunderstanding," though Amine and Mathilde privately gripe about the foreigners' hypocrisy. Their daughter, Aïcha, is initially too focused on studying medicine in Strasbourg, France, to pay attention to the counterculture or the rising civil unrest in that country, but then she meets Mehdi Daoud, an outspoken economics major who convinces her to open herself up to the world so she can better understand what patients are going through. Back home, Selim, Aïcha's easygoing, academically challenged younger brother, is already chafing against cultural expectations when he encounters a hashish-smoking Danish girl en route to the "famous hippie hotbed" of Essaouira. The book's free-wheeling third-person-present narrative unfolds over the course of several years, pinballing from character to character to paint a comprehensive picture of a family and a country in the grips of an identity crisis. Slimani manages to acknowledge the oppression and brutality inherent to the era while suffusing her younger protagonists' stories with optimism and a hint of what's to come. An illuminating intergenerational drama. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.