Poor Little Bitch Girl

It all starts with a cat-and-mouse chase to the death in a Baltimore funfair: the Jackal, Bourne’s age-old antagonist, is back and Bourne is forced from his idyllic retirement with his wife and children to confront his enemy. In Europe, Russia and America there are men and women whose lust for power is disguised by their positions and respectability. Their aim: to gain control at the highest level, to avenge, to destroy. Jason Bourne has been the assassin before: now he longs for peace with his family, but the threat of the Jackal puts in jeopardy all possibility of peace …

Such was the battle that raged between Cousin K and me: good done badly; evil done well.” And such is the twisted logic of good and bad, right and wrong, knitted into this novella by one of the most powerful voices to emerge from North Africa in our time. With his father brutally killed as a traitor during a national liberation war and his older brother an army officer far away, the young narrator lives reclusively with his mother, who scorns him. He turns to his young cousin for affection, only to be mocked and humiliated so deeply that his love becomes hopelessly entangled with hatred.

Fate places a young woman in the narrator’s path when he rescues her from a violent attack, and the reawakening of his confused passions proceeds toward terrible vengeance. In this nameless narrator’s tormented reflections, played out against the backdrop of an indifferent world, Yasmina Khadra plumbs the mysteries of the crippled heart’s desires.