Description

Abdelaziz Errachidi

Translated by Mbarek Sryfi

When Bedouins Settle

ISBN: 978-1-956921-83-0 (pbk.)

(October, 2026)

One autumn night, a gleaming white car — new, empty, without a single passenger or license plate — slams into a power pole on the edge of a remote oasis village in southern Morocco. No bodies. No survivors. No explanation. Only a bag of seeds, an old pickaxe, and a trunk full of questions.

From this single, impossible image, an entire world unspools. The village’s storytellers seize the wreck as fuel for their imaginations — treasure hunters, thieves, holy men, curses — and no one tells the story louder than Mahjoub, the itinerant barber whose tall tales conceal a darker truth. In the crumbling qsar at the heart of the village, the widow Itto keeps vigil for her husband Abd al-Nur, a former colonial power broker whose wealth, cruelty, and uncanny second death have made him a legend no one dares question aloud. And somewhere beyond the palm groves, a foreign doctor who fled the world to treat the village’s blindness pours her aching heart — and an unfinished novel of her own — into pages addressed to a lover who is no longer there, pages that may hold the only true account of what happened that night.

Blending oral legend, colonial memory, and the restless ache of desire, Bedouins on the Edge moves like a story told around a fire: passed hand to hand, embellished with every telling, until fact and invention become impossible to separate. Abdelaziz Errachidi’s spare, incantatory prose — rendered into equally compelling English by Mbarek Sryfi — captures a Morocco rarely seen in translation: a drought-stricken oasis where treasure, faith, and grief are always just out of reach, and where everyone, in the end, is a Bedouin on the edge of somewhere else.