The Family House

The novel is set in Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century. Farida relates memories of her childhood and growing up in ‘the family house’ built by her grandfather Kabour, a strong, brave and chivalrous man who fled his village after a physical altercation with a local official who had attacked a farmer. In his new abode on the banks of the Tensift River, near the city of Safi, Kabour establishes himself as a patriarch. He marries four women to give him innumerable children to work for him. He becomes a successful businessman and a local legend. Farida meanwhile is forced to leave her mother as a young child after her parents’ divorce and move to the family house, where she shares in the life of the different generations living there. Reaching the age of forty, she decides to enrol at film school and write a screenplay about the life of her extraordinary and complex grandfather.