Autumn of the Phantoms by Yasmina Khadra

Brahim Llob, the policeman-writer, is summoned by the chief of Algerian police and is fired for having published Morituri, the book which the Algerian establishment considered dishonorable and full of lies. Following a trip back to his hometown where he becomes a victim of an attack by a GIA commando, Llob goes back to Algiers. Fiction and reality intermesh, in this third volume of the Inspector Llob series, which has the violence of Algeria as a constant supporting character throughout.

Translated by Aubrey Botsford from the original French, L'Automne des Chimeres.

YASMINA KHADRA is the pseudonym of the Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul, who was born in 1956. A high ranking officer in the Algerian army, he went into exile in France in 2000, where he now lives in seclusion. In his several writings on the civil war in Algeria, Khadra exposes the current regime and the fundamentalist opposition as the joint guilty parties in the Algerian Tragedy. Before his admission of identity in 2001, a leading critic in France wrote: "A he or a she? It doesn't matter. What matters is that Yasmina Khadra is today one of Algeria's most important writers."

Read an article on Algeria by Janine di Giovanni