Samarcande Amin Maalouf

the grotesque world of the American John Irving. From South America came Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, Milos Kundera from Eastern Europe, and francophone countries supplied, among many others, Anne Hébert (Quebec), the Lebanese Amin Maalouf (Samarcande, 1988) and Tahar Ben Jalloun, the first North African to win the Goncourt (with La Nuit sacrée, 1987). The two major preoccupations of the current literary novel also found an echo in best-selling fiction: history and autobiography. Traditional