Discretion

Yamina Taleb is nearing her seventieth birthday and has settled into a calm routine. She is grateful to the country that has taken her in, and her small joy is hunting down bargains on plastic kitchen gadgets. Her family means more to her than anything.

Her children see their lives in Paris in a different light. They struggle to belong and often feel shut out. Omar, who drives for a ride-hailing service, wonders whether it is too late to change direction as the years slip past from behind the wheel. His sisters have grown weary of constantly proving their loyalty to a country that feels like home and yet does not.

A family trip changes things. Rather than travelling to Algeria, the Talebs rent a villa with a pool on the Atlantic coast, and there they begin to see how much kinship shapes their sense of where they belong.

Moving between Algeria and Paris, the novel follows a family of first- and second-generation immigrants as they piece together their place in France. The author, a French novelist of Algerian descent, wrote the book in French under the title La Discrétion. It won the Prix Maryse Condé in 2020 and was named one of the Financial Times' best summer books of 2022 in the fiction in translation category.