This Blinding Absence of Light

An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France, This Blinding Absence of Light is the latest work by internationally renowned author Tahar Ben Jelloun, the first North African winner of the Prix Goncourt and winner of the Prix Mahgreb. Crafting real life events into narrative fiction, Ben Jelloun reveals the horrific story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies in underground cells with no light and only enough food and water to keep them lingering on the edge of death. Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben Jelloun narrates the story in the simplest of language and delivers a shocking novel that explores both the limitlessness of inhumanity and the impossible endurance of the human will.

• The Book of Salt: A Novel
• Celestial Bodies
• For Bread Alone
• The Sand Child
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party
• The Nickel Boys: A Novel
• Parable of the Sower
• Celestial Bodies
• No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison