Street Of Thieves

"A tremendous accomplishment... Zone is, in short, one of the best books of the year" - Daily Beast

Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona, hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts. This is the same group he worked for in Tangier shortly after being cast out by his father.

Lakhdar's transformations – from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner – unfold against the backdrop of some of the most significant events of recent years: the tumultuous and inspiring eruption of the Arab Spring and the grim collapse of Europe's economy.

If all of that isn't enough, Lakhdar reunites with a childhood friend who is planning an assassination, a murder that Lakhdar opposes. A finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Street of Thieves solidifies Mathias Enard's place as one of France's most ambitious and astute contemporary novelists. This book may even surpass Enard's earlier work, Zone, which Christophe Claro boldly declared to be "the novel of the decade, if not of the century."

Mathias Enard studied Persian and Arabic and spent extensive periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de La Rochefoucauld for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded numerous prizes for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.

Charlotte Mandell has translated works from numerous notable French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot, among others. She received a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her translation of Enard's Zone along with a French Voices grant.