Désert is the title of a novel written by French author and Nobel laureate

Nobel Prize in Literature

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...

 J. M. G. Le Clézio, considered to be one of his breakthrough novels. It won the Académie française

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

's Grand Prix Paul Morand in 1980.

Plot summary

Two stories are interwoven. The shorter, which begins and ends the book, is specifically set in 1910–1912 and tells of the last uprising of the desert tribes against the French protectorate of Morocco, mostly as observed by a small boy, Nour. The longer, the story of Lalla, is set in an indefinite time, but obviously after the Second World War. It describes her early life in a Shanty "city"

Shanty town

A shanty town is a slum settlement of impoverished people who live in improvised dwellings made from scrap materials: often plywood, corrugated metal and sheets of plastic...

 on the edge of an unnamed Moroccan

Morocco

Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

 coastal town, and particularly her friendship with "the Hartani"

Haratin

Haratin are oasis-dwellers in the Sahara, especially in southern Morocco and Mauritania, who make up a socially and ethnically distinct group of largely sedentary dark colored workers speaking either Berber or Arabic...

 who, like her, originates from the desert tribes. It narrates the time she spends in Marseilles and her eventual return to the shanty city, where she gives birth to the Hartani's child.

Reviews

Review taken from Reuters

Reuters

Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...

,India

Review taken from the TLS

TLS

-Computing:* Transport Layer Security, a network protocol and successor to Secure Sockets Layer * Thread-local storage, a mechanism for allocating variables in computer science...

Review taken from kirjasto.sci.fi

Review taken from Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

Review taken from World Literature Today

Review taken from Western Sahara information

Review taken from the web-page of The Hindu Group;