Badawi, Paperback

Descriere

Published to wide critical acclaim in France, Badawi is Mohed Altrad s heartrending debut novel, inspired by the author s own narrative arc from Bedouin orphan to engineer and finally billionaire businessman. In the Syrian desert, a young boy watches as his mother dies. She was a repudiated woman, abandoned by the boy s powerful father, leaving Maiouf to his scornful grandmother. Though the Bedouin tribes have stopped their centuries-long travels across the dunes their tents long since converted into sedentary shacks Maiouf s grandmother wants him to carry on tradition as a shepherd. But from the first time he sneaks off to the white-walled schoolhouse to watch the other children learn, Maiouf envisions a different future for himself. This is one extraordinary child s story of fighting for an education, and a life, he was never supposed to have, from a tiny desert village to the city of Raqqa, from the university halls of Montpellier on to the oil fields of Abu Dhabi. But is a life of exile the one he wants? Can a child whose name means the abandoned one ever make a home for himself? With each step forward, he feels the love of his youth a steadfast young Syrian woman named Fadia and the shifting, haunted sands of his native village pulling him back toward the past he thought he had left behind.""