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Dalia Dawood, Financial Times suggest, Algerian-born Kaouther Adimi’s story of a literary hub’s early days and its later demise can feel a little disjointed.
In Kaouther Adimi’s award-nominated third novel A Bookshop in Algiers — her first to be translated into English, by Chris Andrews — land and literature entwine. Algeria, shaped by its dark and tragic history, is also sculpted by stories, both in the memories of its people and the narratives created and sold at an unassuming bookshop and lending library, which is the novel’s main setting. 
Photo: The bookstore, Les Vraies Richesses, opened by Edmond Charlot © Youcef Krache/Getty Images
In just 160 pages, the book charts the changing fortunes of the bookshop — a real-life institution named Les Vraies Richesses that was opened by French-Algerian publisher Edmond Charlot in the 1930s — with a blend of fact and fiction. It recounts the turbulent years of war and revolution between Charlot and the appearance of another man, a character named Ryad, who arrives from Paris in 2017 to empty the shop now that it has been sold to a developer...
Charlot names his shop after a novel by French author Jean Giono, “a book in which he urges us to return to the true riches, that is, the land, the sun, the streams, and finally literature too”. Though it is presented as a curt story, cut together hastily, A Bookshop in Algiers reminds us that in literature, as in life, we belong in a place only temporarily — and we shape it according to our memories.
Source: Financial Times
