Our Riches (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811228152)

Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto "by the young, for the young," discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers.

Our Riches interweaves Charlot's story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad's no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop's self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man's mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it's a hymn to the book and to the love of books.

Author: Kaouther Adimi
ISBN-10: 0811228150
ISBN-13: 9780811228152
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 04/28/2020
Pages: 160
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.30w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/13/2020
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2020 pg. 5
Library Journal 04/01/2020 pg. 87
Booklist 12/04/2020