I learned so much about the history and culture of Algeria even though this book is fiction. Parts of the story were a little drawn out but the author writes so that you really get to know and care about the characters. Highly recommend it!

This story is heartbreaking. It’s romantic and tragic and cruel, but comforting. All hopes are not lost even through years and wars, there’s always a possibility for the impossible. It came to me at a time that was special and will always have a unique place in my heart for the hope that I was lingering too.

Couldn't even finish it. Very disappointing.

I really liked this book- it starts out right away with action and has a great pace throughout. The whole book was rather heartbreaking and brutal, but really interesting. I like the way it started with the two main characters’ separation and then they went back and forth between both Nassreddine and Anna’s backstories and what they did in the time between until they meet again. Overall great read, but maybe a little depressing of a pick during a global pandemic.

I really wanted to enjoy this book but I just couldn't. While the story, broadly, is interesting, I didn't find the characters engaging, except maybe Jallal. I think I would have preferred it if I could have found a copy in French, but the English translation felt quite stiff at times. Sort of made me think of Effroyable Jardins, but that might just be because of the circus and the presence of war. I didn't like that book either. Anyway, a tentative 1.5 rounded up to two and my third book in my literary journey around the world.

Algeria Book around the World

So I am incredibly ignorant to this period in history. I am grateful to learn more about the war, The French's involvement in Algeria, and the aftermath. I started the read the world challenge for this very reason, to learn a lot more apart from my own perspective.

However, as a book this was not very good. In the same chapter we got a VARIETY of POVs, all in third person and many different perspectives. Every chapter, right after a "cliffhanger" we went through a VARIETY of time periods back and forth and forward again. This choppy formatting made it very difficult to stay engaged with the characters and very difficult to follow the storyline.

Anna's past with the circus I thought was brought in way too late in the book. By the time we went allll the way back and explored Anna's childhood and her life in the circus I felt like it was a bit too late to get her backstory? Or to care about it?

And finally, I find that almost everytime a male author tries to write a graphic sex scene (or even semi graphic) from the female POV --even in third person!-- it is disturbing moreso than sensual or romantic. This really took away from the love story for me and I never really got it.

I kept reading this book for the history, what I was learning, the little boy Jallal.

The Lovers of Algeria is a horrifyingly vivid, achingly tragic novel with, at its core, a fragile and imperfect love story spanning decades of loss, relocation, and hopeful discovery in its North African setting. The story, told in overlapping flashbacks and contemporary (1997) scenes, is too involved to recite, but it should be enough to say that Anna, a Swiss gaouria, and Arab Nassreddine have an unconventional love affair that begins when they are young adults and continues, or tries to continue, amid four decades of war between European, Algerian, and religious interests. The scenes of conflict are intensely graphic, but Benmalek’s skill as an author is equally as true in crafting scenes of memorable, albeit sad beauty for his cautious but passionate pair; these are the scenes that may — and I am not sure they do — transcend two lives brimmed with disappointment. Love, we hope, can outlast everything, but the scars of destruction this story undresses for us do not fade from memory so easily.