Mapped
Nedjma
Kateb Yacine
In eastern Algeria under French colonial rule, four young men, Rachid, Lakhdar, Mourad and Mustapha, circle around the beautiful, unattainable Nedjma, a woman of mixed blood who comes to stand for Algeria itself. Kateb Yacine's fractured, founding novel of Algerian literature maps the real east: the port and worksites of Bône, the gorge-cut city of Constantine, the ancestral lands of the Keblout tribe, and the colonial labour and violence out of which a national consciousness is being born.
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The Plague
Albert Camus
When plague breaks out in the Algerian port of Oran, the town is sealed off and its people must reckon, each in their own way, with an absurd and impersonal death. Camus keeps the city real and specific: Dr Rieux's surgery in the ordinary streets, the closed town gates that turn Oran into a prison, the harbour and the sea that are suddenly forbidden, the cathedral where Father Paneloux preaches, and the municipal stadium turned into an isolation camp.
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The Stranger
Albert Camus
Camus's Algiers is a city of white terraces, harbour light and Sunday tedium, where an ordinary clerk drifts from a funeral toward a killing on the sand. The map runs west from the courthouse and prison of the old European quarter out past the beaches beyond the bay to the inland town where the novel opens.
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