Showing results by author "Leila Taylor" in All Categories

Morocco, 1968. As she stands at the window, Mathilde reflects on the opportunities before her. Looking out at her garden, the roses - brought in from Marrakech - have bloomed and their sweet, fresh scent pervades the garden. Anything feels possible, and she is determined to celebrate it. Don't they have the right to enjoy life, after dedicating their best years to the war and then to this farm?

Alsace, 1944. Mathilde finds herself falling deeply in love with Amine Belhaj, a Moroccan soldier, billeted in her town, fighting for the French. After the Liberation, Mathilde leaves France, following Amine to Morocco. But life here is unrecognisable to this brave and passionate young woman. Where she once danced, bickered with her sister, her life is now that of a farmer's wife - with all the sacrifices and vexations that brings. Suffocated by the heat, by her loneliness on the farm, by the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner and by the lack of money, Mathilde grows restless.

When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect caretaker for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite and devoted woman who sings to their children, cleans the family's chic apartment in Paris' upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint and is able to host enviable birthday parties.

Over one night, alone in the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice, Leïla Slimani grapples with the self as it is revealed in solitude. In a place of old and new, she confronts her past and her present, through her life as a Moroccan woman, as a writer, and as a daughter. Surrounded by art, she explores what it means to behold and clasp beauty; enveloped by night, she confronts the meaning of life and death.

Adèle appears to have the perfect life. A respected journalist, she lives in a flawless Parisian apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But beneath the veneer of 'having it all', she is bored - and consumed by an insatiable need for sex, whatever the cost. Struggling to contain the twin forces of compulsion and desire, she begins to orchestrate her life around her one-night stands and extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making.

Part memoir and part cultural critique, Darkly: Blackness and America's Gothic Soul explores American culture's inevitable gothicity in the traces left from chattel slavery. The persistence of white supremacy and the ubiquity of Black deaths feed a national culture of terror and a perpetual undercurrent of mourning.