“At the end of the 1970s, Sami, a young boy, disappeared into of the Algiers countryside. To never forget him, his childhood friend Alya writes his story, their story, every day, reinventing the past, fixing the present, a time of expectation and imagination.
“It is difficult for me to know the person I am, but it is easy for me to know why I write. It happened in 1979. In the Algerian nights when my dreams were no longer childhood dreams. It happened in expectation of a love that would not return. It happened in the hope of becoming a person who would find his place in the world. It happened every evening, when I watched the sun fall behind the plains of Mitidja. Each time I told myself that he took away a part of me. Everything turns, everything fades and everything starts again and I don’t know if we will ever find what we lost.
“Sauvage is the story of that year.”
Laurence Clerfeuille, of Saint Michael’s College, led a book club discussion in French for the AFLCR.