A Battle from the Start by Brian Steel Wills
The award-winning, #1 internationally bestselling new novel by the author of The Perfect Nanny, about a woman in an interracial marriage whose fierce desire for autonomy parallels her adopted country's fight for independence The world of men is just like the world of botany. In the end, one species dominates another. One day, the orange will win out over the lemon, or vice versa, and the tree will once again produce fruit that people can eat. In her first new novel since The Perfect Nanny launched her onto the world stage and won her acclaim for her devastatingly perceptive character studies (The New York Times Book Review), Leila Slimani draws on her own family's inspiring story for the first volume in a planned trilogy about race, resilience, and women's empowerment. Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War I. After the war, the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate his family farm's rocky terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, the lack of money, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. Left increasingly alone to raise her two children in a world whose rules she does not understand, and with her daughter taunted at school by rich French girls for her secondhand clothes and unruly hair, Mathilde goes from being reduced to a farmer's wife to defying the country's chauvinism and repressive social codes by offering medical services to the rural population. As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine finds himself caught in the crossfire: in solidarity with his Moroccan workers yet also a landowner, despised by the French yet married to a Frenchwoman, and proud of his wife's resolve but ashamed by her refusal to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of others--especially the women, forced to live in the land of men--and with this novel, Leila Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation.
Wills, Brian Steel: - Brian Steel Wills is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University, where he is professor of history. He is the author of The Confederacy's Greatest Cavalryman: Nathan Bedford Forrest (also from Kansas) and The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780060168322 |
| ISBN 10 | 0060168323 |
| Title | A Battle from the Start |
| Author | Brian Steel Wills |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | HarperCollins Publishers Inc |
| Year published | 1992-06-01 |
| Number of pages | 457 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |