Book Beginnings: The Attack by Yasmina Khadra

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 22 in 22 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, only recently I decided to participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

I don’t remember hearing an explosion. A hissing sound, maybe, like tearing fabric, but I’m not certain. My attention was distracted by that quasi-divinity and the host of devoted followers surrounding him as his bodyguards tried to clear a passage to his waiting automobile.

Last week I featured Kitty Veldis’s 2018 historical novel Not Our Kind and this week it’s Yasmina Khadra’s 2006 novel The Attack. Yasmina Khadra is the pen name for Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul. While serving as an officer in the Algerian military he originally adopted the feminine pseudonym in the late 1980s to masquerade his true identity from the military and thus prevent his writing from being censored. Currently living in France, even after his true identity was revealed in 2001 he continues to write under the pen name

Let’s allow publisher Nan A. Talese to tell us more:

Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli citizen, is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. Dedicated to his work, respected and admired by his colleagues and community, he represents integration at its most successful. He has learned to live with the violence and chaos that plague his city, and on the night of a deadly bombing in a local restaurant, he works tirelessly to help the shocked and shattered patients brought to the emergency room. But this night of turmoil and death takes a horrifyingly personal turn. His wife’s body is found among the dead, with massive injuries, the police coldly announce, typical of those found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers. As evidence mounts that his wife, Sihem, was responsible for the catastrophic bombing, Dr. Jaafari is torn between cherished memories of their years together and the inescapable realization that the beautiful, intelligent, thoroughly modern woman he loved had a life far removed from the comfortable, assimilated existence they shared.