The Return: Part One

About this book

In the city of Oujda, which knew nothing but the smell of toil and deprivation, Abdel Ghani was born, the youngest of his siblings. The boy found nothing in childhood but cruel poverty and the burden of a struggling father wrestling life. But deprivation left him no room for resistance: at fourteen, on the night of a drunken spree, his bitterness crystallized into a violent act with no way back — a murder that filled the cup of rage and forced him to flee everything. Ten years or more the fugitive spent hunted through Morocco's dark corners. Black years in which he carved with his own hands a history of violations and follies: from killing to rape, from theft to fraud. Abdel Ghani was nothing but a lost boy seeking survival at any price. But the fate that robbed him of childhood granted him a gift: in Casablanca he decided to exploit his talent for drawing to climb the ladder, achieving wealth, glory, and world fame — becoming an artist who owned everything his past had deprived him of. Yet memory does not betray; it returns to expose a trick — and the artist discovers that the road back is the only road left, and that the madness he fled may have been the only truth he ever owned. The first part of a story of crime, art, and the return of the repressed.