Franco-Moroccan Author’s Debut Novel Explores Bicultural Identity and Urban Struggles

In this first work, Marouane Bakhti recounts the story of a young man who left the countryside for a troubled life in Paris and who writes to deliver "a hunt for shames and sylvan ghosts". Would this be an autobiography? "I never tried to define my narrative in those terms. Precisely, this permanent tension between the facts that have occurred and fiction nourishes my writing. To begin what I have decided to call a ’novel’, I jumped into this unknown, this blurry zone, this swamp that exists between literature and real life. [...] My memories are a material like any