Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.

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Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman. From 1954 to 1999. From French colonization to the death of King Hassan II.

It is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taia’s last novel, A Country for Dying.

Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina.

In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa.

The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her.

Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of History. To survive. To have a little space of her own.

Malika is Taïa’s mother: M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.

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“Every Abdellah Taia novel is written with a sense of urgency and immediacy. Here lives sensuousness and passion, a fusion of love and violence. Taia’s language arouses the reader’s senses. Reading Living in Your Light, I felt I was hearing a dangerous secret. Taia will seem to be whispering in your ear.” –Lynne Tillman

“Abdellah Taïa writes with great tenderness and sympathy about the intricacies and complexities of his characters' private lives. He then creates high drama from social life and sexual life and the gap between who his protagonists are and what they most desire. He is at his most brilliant in Living in Your Light.” –Colm Toibin

“Taïa’s wonderfully ferocious and contradictory heroine Malika will make you weep and quail by turn. Her testament is a powerful antidote to the sentimentality and exoticism that so often distorts depictions of Arab womanhood.” –Zoë Heller, author of Everything You Know

“Everything about Living in Your Light is unexpected. A Moroccan woman of the disappointed independence generation speaks of her struggle to keep power over her life, of what she knows of the suffering of the poor, and of women who are autonomous in a land where colonialism never went away. A poetic and fierce and original work.” –Darryl Pinckney

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