American writer, academic and historian, Alice Kaplan has worked on memory, autobiography and archives concerning the post-war French literary scene. After being interested in the Algeria of Albert Camus in In search of the Stranger, Alice Kaplan crossed the Mediterranean to write her first novel Atlas House which is published simultaneously in France, by Le Bruit du Monde; and in Algeria, published by Barzakh.
Novel translated from the American by Patrick Hersant.
” In the early 1990s, Emily left Minnesota to settle in Bordeaux. On the benches of the university, she meets Daniel Atlas, an Algerian Jew with whom she falls in love. He is still only a young dandy when the civil war tears his country apart, forcing him to leave Emily and France. Back in El Biar, the neighborhood of his childhood, Daniel finds his parents isolated and threatened. This illustrious family of merchants, who knew Algeria, which was colonized then independent, chose to stay on this land against all odds. Many years later, Becca, a young American, will also travel to Algiers to better understand their lineage. In a virtuoso composition, Alice Kaplan, writer and expert on Albert Camus, demonstrates that a novel can be the most beautiful lesson in history. » (Presentation of the editions The Noise of the World)