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This Blinding Absence of Light
This Blinding Absence of Light
Jul 5, 2025 10:52 PM

Author:Tahar Ben Jelloun

This Blinding Absence of Light

In this extraordinary non-fiction novel, based on a true story, Tahar Ben Jelloun traces the experiences of Salim who, in 1971, took part in a failed coup attempt to oust King Hassan II of Morocco. With sixty others Salim was incarcerated in a secret prison complex in the Moroccan desert: he was to remain there for nearly twenty years.

In starkly eloquent, beautiful prose, Ben Jelloun relates the prisoners' experiences as they struggle to survive. The son of a witty, feckless courtier who disowns him, Salim tells stories to keep sane - from the suras of his beloved Koran to the plot of A Streetcar Named Desire. Even in the darkest, most terrible conditions, sympathy, insight, the human quest for meaning and understanding, never desert Salim. The resulting novel is a wrenching yet exquisite celebration of the human spirit and its determination to survive.

'A masterpiece' Judges of the IMPAC award

'a sad and splendid book' New York Times Book Review

Reviews

Green paints an unforgettable portrait of a doomed, amoral world whose characters, trapped in the fog, are somehow waltzing blithely towards oblivion...cinematic in its intensity

—— Robert McCrum , Guardian

Heartbreaking, funny and written with such luminous prose - he's the most brilliant, and neglected, of English writers

—— Red Magazine

Perhaps the best introduction to another great original of the English novel, who learned from Firbank’s economy, but who had his own quite different imaginative world. Loving, set among the servants of an Irish country house, combines his superbly truthful ear for how people really speak with an unforgettable vein of surreal poetry

—— Alan Hollinghurst , New York Times

The most original, the best writer of his time

—— Rebecca West

The most gifted prose writer of his generation

—— V. S. Pritchett

Green's books remain as solid and glittering as gems- They are not, like so many contemporary novels, mere slices of life but highly successful attempts at making art give meaning to life

—— Anthony Burgess

About Henry Green, however, there’s an irreducible, longstanding excitement among the few who have read him... With Green, we’re presented with a singular kind of artist who, like the poets of ancient India and Greece, has nothing to offer us but delight. We don’t know what to do with such a writer

—— Amit Chaudhuri , Guardian

Praise for Lisa Jewell

—— -

Addictively readable

—— The Times

A joy . . . a fun summer read

—— Guardian

The best romantic comedy we've read in ages

—— Company

Tackles serious issues with humour - proving that chick-lit can be intelligent, interesting and huge fun

—— Sunday Express

A triumph

—— Hello

Top marks. Fantastic

—— Heat

Lovely

—— Daily Telegraph

Moving and intelligent

—— Independent

Magnetic, unpretentious and bursting with one-liners

—— Cosmopolitan

Fans of chick-lit will understand when I say that this is a book you simply disappear into

—— Sunday Telegraph
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