Born in Algeria in 1962, Rahmani's family was one of those who fled to France after her father was imprisoned by the new government for having been a Harki, or one of the Algerians who fought for France against the independence of Algeria. This is an impressionistic, semi-autobiographical novel, told from the perspective of a child to teenager, in which resettlement in rural Oise is fraught with religious and social ostracism in the isolation of 1970s French factory towns with workers who despise their Muslim neighbors, even as they fear the sexual revolution corrupting their daughters and try to prevent their kids moving away, and Rahmani's father spirals into depression as his family fragments. There are striking parallels to anti-globalist (shall I say anti-cosmopolitan?) rural Americans, and important questions about what a country owes the people who, coerced or not, served it to their own detriment.