Zahira tells us about the death of her father in the family home in the Moroccan city of Salé, and about how she became a prostitute and moved to Paris; on the eve of surgery, her Algerian friend Aziz - another sex-worker - tells us about his experiences and why he feels he needs to become a woman; Mojtaba, an Iranian exile, writes to his mother to tell her that he's on the run from the Iranian secret services because of his role in student protests against the regime, and rather incautiously asks her to check up on the boyfriend he left behind; and we find out part of what happened to Zahira's aunt Zinab after she disappeared.

Taïa's style takes a bit of getting used to. His main characters in this book are angry, poorly educated people who speak French as a second language and use intonation and repetition to make their points, not sophisticated literary language. At first it feels a bit like being trapped next to a crazy person on the bus, but you soon get beyond that and start to see how Taïa is unpacking their complex personalities through the rant. It's all rather cleverer than it looks.

On the other hand, I'm not too sure that this really works as a novel. He picks up and drops his characters rather arbitrarily, and none of them finds any kind of closure within the text, not even implicitly. He's more interested in digging out the underlying problems that got them where they are than in telling us whether they stand a chance of arriving where they would like to be. And those problems are pretty much the ones we would expect: homophobia, oppression of women, colonialism, and racial prejudice between Arab and Black Moroccans. Obviously, having had first-hand experience, he's in a good position to tell us more about these issues than we could guess from our general knowledge, but there isn't space in this book for a huge amount of that sort of detail.

And I had one pretty big caveat: this is a book by a male writer in which two women talk in the first person about how being sex-workers has had a perversely empowering effect on their lives. I can understand how that could be, in the specific context of the book where the women wouldn't have had any control over their own lives if they'd stayed within the family, but all the same I think I would be more inclined to trust that sort of statement if it came from a female author.

So, having picked it up for the subject-matter, it turns out that it's the style I found more interesting... ( )