# Desert

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/j-m-g-le-clezio/desert/9781848873810

JSON version (same data): https://www.bookquiver.com/j-m-g-le-clezio/desert/9781848873810.json

![Desert](https://quivercdn.com/covers/atlantic-books/jean-marie-le-clezio/desert_978-18-4887-381-0.jpg?v=2026-05-22%2022%3A21%3A43)

- Book: [Desert](https://www.bookquiver.com/j-m-g-le-clezio/desert) ([Desert.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/j-m-g-le-clezio/desert.md))
- Authors: [J. M. G. Le Clézio](https://www.bookquiver.com/j-m-g-le-clezio), [C. Dickson](https://www.bookquiver.com/c-dickson)
- Publisher: atlantic_books
- ISBN: 978-18-4887-381-0
- Published: 2011-03-01
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

Young Nour is a North African desert tribesman. It is 1909, and as the First World War looms Nour’s tribe – the Blue Men – are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward, in the hope of finding a land in which they can again be free. Decades later, an orphaned descendant of the Blue Men – a girl called Lalla – is living in a shantytown on the coast of Morocco. Lalla has inherited both the pride and the resilience of her tribe – and she will need them, as she makes a bid to escape her forced marriage to a wealthy older man. She flees to Marseilles, where she experiences both the hardships of immigrant life – as a hotel maid – and the material prosperity of those who succeed – when she becomes a successful model. And yet Lalla does not betray the legacy of her ancestors. In these two narratives set in counterpoint, Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio tells – powerfully and movingly – the story of the ‘last free men’ and of Europe’s colonial legacy – a story of war and exile and of the endurance of the human spirit.