The final novel in the international bestselling trilogy from 'the literary phenomenon' (Elle) Ahlem Mosteghanemi, The Dust of Promises is a haunting, elegiac story of love, memory and betrayal - and of what it means to come home.
Ahlem Mosteghanemi is a legend in Algeria: the daughter of an activist exiled during the country's war of independence, she became the first Algerian woman to publish fiction in the Arabic language. The ensuing misogynistic backlash paradoxically empowered her exilic writings, making her novels bestsellers. Mosteghanemi's ambitious trilogy is a testament of exile, an allegory of erotic love and an act of political resistance . Description is dreamy and insubstantial, as images effloresce into conceits ("her laughter's high heels"; she "danced as if weeping"), tantalising the reader with a version of the lover's tantalisation. An element of postmodern illusionism adds a trompe l'oeil quality, for in this aesthetic world, memory precedes the event remembered; fiction engenders events in the 'real' world . A rhapsodic and voluptuous prose poem
