Mia

MIA is the first book in the series “The Women We Love”.

Between Paris, Monaco, Marseille, Portugal, Italy and Tunisia, the narrator remembers Mia: an Algerian, Muslim, European woman, elegant, free, and impossible to reduce to a single definition. What begins as a story of desire and fascination becomes a novel about memory, social class, identity, travel and loss.

Mia is not merely a woman who was loved. She is a way of looking at contemporary Europe. Through her, the book shows how money, origin, religion, skin, language and passport determine who is accepted, who is desired, who is tolerated and who is treated as a threat. Without manifestos or easy speeches, MIA reveals the politics hidden in intimate gestures: in a hotel, in a street, at a border, over dinner, in a room or in a simple goodbye. Even though no goodbye is ever simple.

At the same time, it is a deeply sensory novel. There are cafés in Paris, rooms in Monaco, roads in the Douro, in Portugal, light on skin, wine, silence, humour, sex, tenderness and the bitter...