The Spider's House

In the ancient Moroccan city of Fez in 1954, as the nationalist rising against French rule reaches the medina, an illiterate boy, Amar, and a disillusioned American writer, Stenham, are thrown together amid the violence. Bowles maps the real city precisely: the labyrinth of Fez el-Bali, the shrine of Moulay Idriss and the Qarawiyyin at its heart, the French Ville Nouvelle where the settlers live, the Palais Jamaï on the medina's edge, and the Merinid tombs on the hills above from which the whole city is seen.

Amar

The Fez medina (Fez el-Bali)

Part 1

Amar, the pious, illiterate son of a poor craftsman, knows the medina's thousands of alleys by instinct and lives by its old certainties. As the nationalist struggle turns the city violent and the French crack down, the boy's whole inherited world begins to come apart around him.

Part 1

explicit Amar's world is Fez el-Bali, the real walled old city of Fez, one of the largest living medieval medinas in the world; its alleys and souks are the novel's principal setting.

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