In addition to The Swallows of Kabul, two other novels are also available in English: In the Name of God (2000) and Wolf Dreams (2003). The revelation caused an uproar in French literary circles because of the Algerian army’s crackdown against the Islamist radicals in the late 1980s and the 1990s.

A year earlier, he had chosen exile in France.

In 2001 Khadra revealed his identity, after many years in the army and a considerable body of work that had generated much speculation about the person behind the name. Yasmina Khadra is the nom de plume of Algerian high-ranking army officer Mohammad Moulessehoul, who used a woman’s name to evade the military censors. His latest work, originally published in French in 2002 and rendered into often beautiful and strangely mysterious English by John Cullen, shifs the locus of action from civil war-torn Algeria, the setting of Khadra’s earlier novels, to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. ~~Įarly in The Swallows of Kabul, Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s fourth work published in English, the scene is set in “a city in an advance stage of decomposition” where “men have gone mad they have turned their backs on the day in order to face the night.” Khadra is a writer of plagued, decaying places and lives. Although Khadra’s Swallows of Kabul is not set in Algeria, the review, which was published in the Daily Star/International Herald Tribune, devotes considerable attention to the political background of Khadra’s Algerian novels. The recent success of the film Of Gods and Men, which is set in Algeria in the 1990s when the country was gripped by a civil war between an Islamist insurgency and the government, prompted me to re-read a review-essay I had written in 2004 of the latest novel of the Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra.

Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra