Nine knows nothing else about her childhood: nothing but her parents’ meeting in Algeria, their too brief love affair and her father, who was cut down by the war and whose heart was placed in a wooden cabin. Madame Plume, her mother, doesn’t talk about her past, her country or her memories. One day, she tore herself away from the kindness of Fatma la douce, fleeing her village in Kabylie to bring her daughter to a town in the north of France, where the two of them lived as a close-knit pair. So begins a different kind of wandering, celebrating the desert beneath a too-low sky. Nine grows up right up against her mother, with a hunger to know, to understand and to free herself that will include learning piano and languages as well as a return to Kabylie, the land of her roots.

This short tale of exile espouses the pace and poetry of a legend to describe a child who is overwhelmed by her own untold past, and her search for her own for her own identity.

A first novel with a limpidly poetic style that uses gentle tones to tell the story of a fatherless daughter, of being uprooted and exiled, and of women whose lives are devastated by war.