Synopses & Reviews
In Land and Blood, his secondnovel, the Algerian-Kabyle writer Mouloud Feraoun offers a detailed portrait of lifefor Algerian Kabyles in the 1920s and 1930s through the story of a Kabyle-Berberman, Amer. Like many Kabyle men of the 1930s, Amer leaves his village to work in thecoal mines of France. While in France, he inadvertently kills his own uncle in anaccident that sets in motion forces of betrayal and revenge once he returnshome.
Unlike The Poor Man's Son, his first fictional work, Land and Blood is notautobiographical but is rather the first in a series of novelsFeraoun planned to write about immigrant ties between France and Algeria in theyears leading up to World War II. Through Amer's story, Feraoun unveils what dailylife was like in a poor village of colonial-era Algeria. Published in 1953, a yearbefore the outbreak of the Algerian War, Land andBlood provides a fascinating account of Muslim, Berber-Arabsocial, cultural, and religious practices of rural Algeria in the pre-independenceera.