The Barbary Figs. Questo articolo non è disponibile.The Barbary Figs

Winner of the Arab Book Prize.

Two old friends and cousins find themselves side by side on the flight from Algiers to Constantine. There is a lot of history between them, as well as bad blood. The flight will last only an hour?an hour during which both their stories will be told, interspersed by anecdotes of Algeria's struggle to release itself from France's colonial grip. The title, The Barbary Figs, is a symbol of the "old" Algeria, since their grandfather used to grow them on his estate. The "new" Algeria is far less straightforward, and has produced far more bitter fruit.

Rachid Boudjedra: Rachid Boudjedra is an Algerian writer who has published numerous poems, essays and novels. Before 1982, these were generally in French, but since then he has concentrated on writing in Arabic.

André Naffis-Sahely: André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, translator and journalist, who reviews for the regularly for the TLS and The Independent. In 2010 he edited the Selected Prose of Mick Imlah. His translations of Abdellatif Laâbi's Le fond de la Jarre and Frankétienne's Mûr à cr

Rashid Boudjedra was born in Aïn Beida, Algeria, in 1941. He interrupted his studies in the late 1950s to join the resistance to French rule and after being wounded, was sent first to Eastern Europe and then to Spain as a representative of the National Liberation Front. After a string of highly successful novels during the 1980s and early 1990s, which saw him compared to Faulkner and García Márquez, Boudjedra decided to stop writing in French in favour of Arabic.