The Last Life

First US edition. 8vo. 352pp. Mustard yellow cloth boards, stamped in silver to spine; deckled fore-edges.

Messud's second book, following the PEN/Faulkner Award finalist When the World Was Steady. "The beginning, as I take it, was the summer night of my fifteenth year when my grandfather shot at me." The colonial experience as refracted through the prism of the coming-of-age of a French-Algerian expatriate girl in the south of France.

"In this rich, resonant, beautifully written novel, Claire Messud brilliantly illuminates the dislocations of body and soul that are the true consequences of exile." –Andrea Barrett