About

I write novels about family, land, memory, and the arrangements families make with silence.

My first novel, The Woman from Nowhere, is a detective story set in a gorge in the Kabylie mountains, where a young woman is found dead with nothing on her but a note in Italian. I wrote it to golden-age rules: every clue the reader needs is on the page, in the order the detective finds it.

The Land We Leave Behind came out of a single document, an acte de tanazul, the deed by which a daughter renounces her share of the family land. It is a family story in which no one is a villain and everything is at stake.

I write in English and in Arabic, and I translate my own books between the two, which is slower than writing them once and teaches me more than anything else I do. I publish them myself, from Abu Dhabi.

You can write to me at contact@ilhembelkherchouche.com. I read everything, and I answer most of it.