Pico

About this book

In the Pacific Ocean's depths, and twenty-two thousand kilometers from the ancestors' land, lie tales official history did not write, but whips of banishment and shackles of "Sanfi" prisoners scripted. The novel "Pico" is no mere literary narration, but an existential journey beginning from "the Room of Pain" to excavate the memory of those forcibly displaced who left Algeria's ports in death ships, carrying with them date-palm seeds, an echo of an old song by Sheikh El-Hassnaoui, and a dream of return that never ages. The novel slips into its characters' complex worlds; from Taieb who condensed all his love into villages he never visited, to Heizia the teacher haunted by the past's ghosts, reaching Francois or Ahmed, that writer oscillating between being the tale's maker or a mere paper character in it. Here reality mingles with delirium, and "Caledonia" turns from a mere tourist archipelago into an eternal prison haunting the children with identity questions: who are we? And does the homeland truly leave us when we leave it? In a tender literary style.