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Synopsis

What comes of riches when it means giving up the past?

Casablanca’s stinking alleys are the only home that nineteen-year-old Youssef El-Mekki has ever known. Raised by his mother in a one-room home, the film stars flickering on the local cinema’s screen offer the only glimmer of hope to his frustrated dreams of escape. Until, that is, the father he thought dead turns out to be very much alive.

A shady local businessman with wealth to burn, Nabil is disenchanted with his daughter and eager to take in the boy he never knew. Soon Youssef’s installed in his penthouse and sampling the gold-plated luxuries enjoyed by Casablanca’s elite. But as he leaves the slums of his childhood behind him, he comes up against a starkly un-glittering reality…

‘By turns troubling and glorious, angry and wise. With her spare, elegant prose, Lalami has constructed a world remarkable for its resilience, its vibrancy, its motion, and, yes, its hope’ Junot Díaz on Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

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