Street of Thieves

"A tremendous accomplishment. . . . Énard's 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, a group he worked for in Tangier not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father.

Lakhdar's transformations—from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner—take place against some of the most important events of the past few years: the violence and exciting eruption of the Arab Spring and the devastating collapse of Europe's economy.

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

Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long 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 many prizes for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.

Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important 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 Énard's Zone along with a French Voices grant.

"Énard pulls off the tricky feat of writing about the lives of disenfranchised individuals without sentimentalizing their predicament or overlooking the serendipitous occurrences that drip into any ordinary human life. Though Street of Thieves frequently dramatizes the tensions between religion and secularism, Énard's characters can slough off or put on whatever ideological garments they wear depending on the situation. For while it's true that—as Aristotle observed—man is a political animal given to establishing and enforcing moral codes, his ability to modulate his prejudices is perhaps more revealing about how he functions in the world."—Christopher Byrd, Barnes & Noble Review

". . . Artfully told, and represents the kind of fiction one hopes will emerge, from Énard or others, after the tumult once known as the Arab Spring has receded a little further into the past."—Robert F. Worth, New York Times,

"The follow-up to Énard's Zone, now widely considered a great novel; this one is, I would argue, equally as great. In fact, it covers its terrain—from Occupy to the Arab Spring—so painfully well that for 265 pages I couldn't remember another novel."— Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire

"Énard [. . .] is more than a French male writer teaching Arabic in Spain. He's a writer whose literary identity and spirit seem unbounded. Deep knowledge of the past and presentiments of the future inform his perspectives and insights into the present. With Street of Thieves, he's written an accessible novel of ideas and politics, propelled by longing for love and freedom. Taken together with Zone, it's clear I'll read everything Énard writes from now on: his language jumps across and down the page, he doesn’t fear engaging with complicated ideas, and he manages to animate living, breathing characters who savor the complexities and ambiguities, the beauties and horrors, of life."—Lee Klein, 3:AM Magazine

"Énard's mystifying prose, with its eternal sentences often spanning entire page lengths, echoes the poetry of human struggle. And as the dramatic ending suggests, it is the courage and selfless spirit inherent in even the most accursed that makes humankind both magnificent and heartbreaking."—Christina Fries, ZYZZYVA

"In the vein of The Catcher in the Rye, Énard's novel depicts a young man lost at sea, looking for a home, who inexorably finds himself in the process. Énard takes the reader into the midst of a youth's frustrations, slaps them around with the fear of being pitted between faith and society, starves them of happiness for his narrator, then, finally gives them hope and through his craft, we love every page of it."—RS Deeren, The Review Lab

"Énard's Zone is an epic of modern literature."—Bomb