Young Nour is a North African desert tribesman. It is 1909, & as the First World War looms Nour`s tribe
- the Blue Men
- are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward, in the hope of finding a land in which they can again be free. Decades later, an orphaned descendant of the Blue Men
- a girl called Lalla
- is living in a shantytown on the coast of Morocco. Lalla has inherited both the pride & the resilience of her tribe
- & she will need them, as she makes a bid to escape her forced marriage to a wealthy older man. She flees to Marseilles, where she experiences both the hardships of immigrant life
- as a hotel maid
- & the material prosperity of those who succeed
- when she becomes a successful model. & yet Lalla does not betray the legacy of her ancestors. In these two narratives set in counterpoint, Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. G. Le Clezio tells
- powerfully & movingly
- the story of the `last free men` & of Europe`s colonial legacy
- a story of war & exile & of the endurance of the human spirit.