Every November, leading figures of French literature gather in the upstairs room of an old-fashioned Paris restaurant and decide on the best novel of the year. The ceremony is staid, traditional, down to the restaurant’s menu, full of classic dishes such as vol-au-vents and foie gras on toast. In pictures of the judging ceremony, the judges wear dark suits; each has four glasses of wine at hand.
The winner of the Goncourt, as the prize is called, is likely to enter the pantheon of world literature, joining a lineage of writers that includes Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. The prize is also a financial boon for authors. As the biggest award in French literature, the Goncourt means a prime spot in storefronts, foreign rights, prestige. By one estimate, winning the Goncourt means nearly €1m of sales in the weeks that follow.
In November 2024, the Académie Goncourt gave the prize to a novel by Kamel Daoud, a celebrated Algerian writer living in France. His victory came at a tense moment for France and its former colony. The relationship, never an easy one, had been strained by the Algerian state’s increasing political repression of its people and French involvement in the dispute between Algeria and Morocco over Western Sahara. (France has sided with Morocco, which claims sovereignty over the territory; Algeria has supported independence movements there.)
Daoud’s own career has been shaped by this troubled relationship. Though he has long been a literary star in both countries, he moved to France in 2023, claiming he could neither “write nor breathe” in Algeria. Daoud’s French publisher, Gallimard, one of France’s largest, was prevented from participating in the 2024 book fair in Algiers. No explanation was given but many suspected it was because Gallimard had published Daoud’s latest novel, Houris.
Houris took on a subject that had long been controversial: Algeria’s civil war or “black decade”, a conflict between the government and armed Islamist groups over the course of the 1990s. Estimates of the number of dead vary; some go as high as 200,000. Massacres of civilians occurred across the country, many of them later claimed by Islamist groups.
The period remains delicate to discuss. In 1999, a law was introduced that provided legal clemency to Islamist fighters who put down their weapons. In 2005, Algeria passed a reconciliation law that widened the amnesty. But unlike some such laws, which require some form of justice to be served to the perpetrators, this law “allows for official forgetting, without any reflection on the actions of either side”, as one historian told me. “The executioners just went home.”
The reconciliation law is very broadly worded, making it illegal “to use or exploit the wounds of the national tragedy to undermine the institutions of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, weaken the state, damage the reputation of all its officials who have served it with dignity, or tarnish Algeria’s image internationally”. The black decade is still not taught in Algerian schools. In interviews for the novel, Daoud dwelled on the law’s wide reach. The civil war, he said, is “a taboo subject that you can’t even think about”.
Houris, which was not published in Algeria, tells the story of the war through a 26-year-old woman, Fajr or Aube (Dawn), who, as a child, survived a massacre at Had Chekala, a village where a real massacre took place in January 1998. In the novel, terrorists killed Aube’s family and cut her throat with a knife. The attack gave her a large scar across her neck: her “smile”, as she calls it. To breathe, Aube has undergone a tracheostomy, a procedure through which the neck is opened to access the windpipe. She wears a cannula, which she sometimes hides with a scarf. “I always choose a rare and expensive fabric,” she says. But the injuries from the attack mean that, two decades on, her voice is barely audible. For her, the scar is a sign of a history that many want to forget. “I am the true trace, the most solid of signs of everything we lived through for 10 years in Algeria,” she says.
As the book opens in 2018, Aube finds herself pregnant with a girl whom she calls her houri, the name of a virgin of paradise in the Muslim tradition. As she contemplates an abortion, she returns to the site of the massacre. The novel takes the form of an interior monologue between Aube and her unborn child. This is punctured by the introduction of Aïssa, a man who has collected stories of the civil war, which he rattles off like a human encyclopedia. He talks at length about the Algerian civil war and the reasons that it remains a controversial part of the country’s heritage. As he says, “there are no books, no films, no witnesses for 200,000 deaths. Silence!” The Goncourt judges praised Daoud for giving “voice to the suffering associated with a dark period in Algeria’s history, particularly that of women”.
Eleven days after the Goncourt ceremony, a woman appeared on an Algerian news show. She wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt; her long hair was tied into a bun. This left her neck visible, and attached to it, some breathing apparatus with a cannula. She introduced herself as Saâda Arbane, 30. Daoud, she claimed, had stolen her personal details to make his bestseller. “It’s my personal life, it’s my story. I’m the only one who should determine how it should be made public.” For 25 years, she said, “I’ve hidden my story, I’ve hidden my face. I don’t want people pointing at me.” But, Arbane said, she had confided in her psychiatrist. “I had no filter, no taboos. I told her everything.” Her psychiatrist was Kamel Daoud’s wife.
Arbane is now suing Daoud in Algeria and in France, through different cases that present her position from two different angles. In Algeria, her case centres on her medical records which, she claims, were stolen from a hospital in Oran and used as research material for Daoud’s book. In France, she is suing Daoud and his publisher Gallimard for invasion of privacy and libel.
Daoud argues there is no basis for such claims, and that his work is based on many stories from the Algerian black decade. He has argued that it is not Arbane herself who is ultimately behind these cases, but that they are part of a wider attempt by the Algerian government to bring down prominent critics of the ruling regime.
In France, where news about Algeria is closely followed, the cases have become caught up in larger questions about history, colonialism and international relations. “Kamel Daoud, from ‘invasion of privacy’ to the Franco-Algerian diplomatic battle,” read a headline about his case. The legal battle brings in a wide cast of political players. Arbane is represented by famous human rights lawyer William Bourdon and his associate Lily Ravon; Daoud’s lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont-Haïk, recently defended former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
The case against Daoud touches upon so many questions that haunt the literary world. To whom does a story belong? Is it acceptable to use another person’s tale for one’s own gain? Does the answer change when one person is a man, the other a woman; one person famous, the other the victim of an event that left her almost literally voiceless?
But the more I tried to drill down on what really happened, the question seemed an even larger one. Daoud’s defence has hinged on his persecution by the Algerian state. But what kind of behaviour can persecution justify?
* * *
Daoud is Algeria’s best-known writer. His work has been translated into 35 languages, and he regularly writes for French outlets about Algeria and contemporary affairs. “A brilliant, indeed dazzling, thinker,” is how one critic described him. Daoud was raised by his grandparents in a small Algerian town called Mesra, while his father, a policeman, worked in different parts of the country. As a teenager, he was attracted to Islamism but quit the movement at 18. “At a certain point, I no longer felt anything,” he later told the New York Times.
In his early 20s, he turned to journalism, covering the Algerian civil war. In 1998, he reported on the massacre at Had Chekala, one of a number of villages where hundreds of people were killed during Ramadan by Islamist forces. Two years later, he started his own column in Le Quotidien d’Oran, the French-language paper in the coastal city of Oran. It was called “Raïna raïkoum”, meaning, roughly, “My opinion, your opinion”. He began to write short fiction, and in the 00s won acclaim for his short books and story collections. “He was very famous,” says Sofiane Hadjadj, his former editor at the Algerian publishing house Barzakh.
In 2010, Daoud wrote a column for Le Monde in which he reimagined the story of the unnamed Arab man murdered in Albert Camus’s existentialist novel The Stranger. He wrote from the perspective of the dead man’s brother, calling back the story told by the novel’s protagonist, a French man named Meursault. The column caught the attention of Hadjadj and his colleagues, who encouraged him to turn it into a novel which they published in Algeria in 2013.
When the novel, The Meursault Investigation, was republished in France in 2014, it became a sensation. With Daoud’s clever conceit, the novel enabled the colonised to talk back to the colonisers through a rebuttal of one of France’s most cherished literary works, itself written by a white Frenchman born in Algeria. The novel, too, offered a complex critique of Algeria’s postcolonial development. “Kamel Daoud’s novel The Meursault Investigation may have attracted more international attention than any other debut in recent years,” wrote Claire Messud in the New York Review of Books. Daoud was welcomed with coverage across the English-speaking media. The Guardian called the book an “instant classic”, and the New York Times profiled him at length. In Oran, Daoud was already a star. But after the publication of Meursault, Hadjadj says, “There was an explosion.”
The novel’s success brought Daoud unusual visibility for a writer. In Algeria, an imam accused Daoud of apostasy after one of his media appearances in which he questioned the role of religion in the Arab world. He also took a prominent place in French culture, writing a column from Algeria for Le Point, a conservative weekly, where he opined on everything from immigration to #MeToo. His writing was lyrical, sometimes impressionistic, and often returned to the dangers of fundamentalism of all kinds. “All my work,” he wrote in an introduction to a collection of the last decade’s columns, “insists on one point. ‘Be careful! A country can be lost in a minute!’”
A frequent guest on TV and radio, Daoud was a notable Algerian voice in a culture that remains often dismissive, and sometimes vindictive, towards its former colony. When President Macron made a state visit to Algeria in 2022, he took the time to have dinner with Daoud.
* * *
While Kamel Daoud’s star was rising, Saâda Arbane was figuring out the best way to move past a terrible tragedy. She was born in 1993 in a small town in Algeria to a family of shepherds. In 2000, Islamist terrorists murdered her parents and five siblings. No one knows if there was any motivation for the attack on their town; it’s likely that, as with many in the period, there was none. The terrorists cut Arbane’s throat and left her for dead. She was six years old.
Arbane was first brought to a local hospital, then transferred to Oran, where she spent five months in a paediatric intensive care unit. From there, she was transferred to France, where she received a tracheostomy operation and was fitted with a cannula. After such an ordeal, “I don’t know that many would be still standing,” her aunt told me.
One of the paediatricians in the Algerian health service, Zahia Mentouri, decided to adopt Arbane. Her adoptive family came from a distinguished lineage: Mentouri had led paediatric intensive care units across the country and briefly been minister of health and social affairs. Her adoptive father, Tayeb Chenntouf, was a well-known historian of Algeria who belonged to a Unesco committee on African history. Together, they lived in Oran.
For some time, Arbane could only consume liquid. Although her family held out hope that surgery might allow her to speak more clearly, it was not possible to reconstruct her vocal cords. The attack left psychological scars as well. A medical report from 2001, after her transfer to France, describes how, at the beginning of a hospital stay in France, her only drawings showed plants surrounded by thorns. When she started drawing people, the same report states, they had all visible tracheostomies, covered up with scarves. (The report is included in Arbane’s evidence for her French trial.)
Arbane had trouble in school in Oran. Few people could understand her. At first, she could not even whisper. “Everyone would stare at her cannula,” said one relative. Classmates called her “Donald Duck” because of her fractured voice. Even today, Arbane’s words are not always clear to those who don’t know her well. For this article, I spoke to her twice via Zoom, with her husband acting as a kind of interpreter, repeating what she had said.
Growing up, Arbane almost never discussed what had happened to her. She did not bring it up with her family, several relatives told me, nor did they ask questions. “To be a child with a tracheostomy, to speak with a whisper, coughing through one’s neck, secreting and wiping snot from one’s neck: I was a freak show to kids and to many adults,” she told me.
Her relatives describe Arbane as someone with unusual determination. “She completes every task she starts,” said one family friend. She spent the last year of high school in France. In 2016, she married and had a son, whom she credits with saving her life. She opened a beauty salon in Oran in her late 20s. “She has fairy fingers,” the family friend said.
Arbane found comfort in riding, something that reminds her of her biological family, who kept horses. As a teenager, she competed internationally. An article in L’Écho d’Oran about the 2009 horse riding championship of the Maghreb, a high-level event, describes how “Saâda Arbane ‘knows the obstacles’; she jumps over them in silence, with determination and elegance”.
* * *
In 2015, Arbane started to see Dr Aïcha Dehdouh, a respected psychiatrist in Oran, who was close to Arbane’s adoptive family. In Arbane’s recollection, she initially went to talk about issues she was having with her mother. Arbane met with Dehdouh in an office in the University hospital of Oran, sometimes with her mother, sometimes one on one. She found Dehdouh easy to talk to, and soon they “talked about everything”. Dehdouh, Arbane recalled, took notes during the sessions on pieces of paper which she put in a folder. (I attempted to reach Dehdouh via two email addresses and her telephone number, as well as through her husband, but she did not respond to these inquiries, nor to a detailed list of the claims made in this article.)
The relationship between Arbane and Dehdouh, Arbane’s lawyers contend, was far closer than is normal between a patient and therapist. They became friends. In texts, Dehdouh wrote to Arbane in the informal “tu” rather than the more formal “vous”. “You’re an angel,” Dehdouh wrote in one message; another she signed “big kisses”. They had sons of a similar age, for whom they discussed organising outings such as pyjama parties. “The relationship started with the children,” Arbane said when we talked. In messages, Dehdouh referred to Arbane’s son as “min [sic] petit cheri” – my little darling. Dehdouh sent a picture of herself at the beach with their sons. Another picture shows them together standing by the water. Dehdouh solicited Arbane’s help renting out an apartment she owned with Daoud.
Around the end of the Covid pandemic, in 2021 Arbane believes, she met up with Dehdouh along with their children. Dehdouh brought her husband. Despite his fame, Arbane didn’t know much about Daoud. “Reading isn’t my thing,” she told me. She sensed that he was surprised by her appearance. Dehdouh told her that she hadn’t shared any details about her background or the attack.
In Arbane’s telling, a few weeks later, during Ramadan, Dehdouh and Daoud invited her over for coffee. Daoud told her that he wanted to write a book about her story. After she refused, he said that he would respect her decision and that there were many stories like her own. He gave her a book about the Emir Abd el-Kader, a 19th-century Algerian leader, renowned for his equestrian prowess, who fought against the French colonial invader.
A short time later, according to the lawsuit, Dehdouh invited Arbane’s adoptive mother to her office and made the same offer on Daoud’s behalf. She said no and told Arbane. Her adoptive parents, Arbane says, had warned her to be careful. But they died in quick succession in 2022 and 2023. When Arbane brought up the book in a later session, Dehdouh told her, “I’m here to protect you.”
The two continued their sessions until Dehdouh and her husband left for France in 2023. Afterwards, they stayed in touch. Though the situation was uncomfortable, Arbane said, she had made clear that she did not want her life to be the basis of anything Daoud was writing. Besides, she was confident that her most personal details were protected by patient-doctor confidentiality.
* * *
Houris was published in France in August 2024. Over the next few weeks, Arbane and her family began to receive calls and texts about the book. “I’m with a guy and his wife. They’re talking about Algeria,” a childhood friend texted Arbane in September. “He talked about a writer who published a book. And the story sounds like your life. 😱”
Arbane forwarded it to Dehdouh. “Congratulations on the book,” she wrote.
Dehdouh replied that she would bring her a copy. “The heroine has a daughter that she calls ‘ma houri’. The story sounds a bit like yours.”
Arbane continued to ask Dehdouh for an explanation. A few weeks later, Arbane wrote to her again, “Hi Aïcha, I hope you’re doing well. I got a call today from a woman saying that there’s a book that talks about [my] story by Kamel.”
The next day she received a response, much more formally written.
“Dear Saâda, I hope you’re doing well. Kamel’s writing generally provokes a lot of reactions. Some people are saying the same thing about other characters … I’ll bring you the book and you’ll read it yourself. The thing that annoys [those people] is that the character named ‘Aube’ who sounds like you is a heroine.” Dehdouh added, “I hope the story doesn’t bother you too much.”
Arbane recalls, “I had more and more questions in my head after each sentence.”
Arbane says that Dehdouh gave her a copy of the book while visiting Algeria in October 2024. The copy was dedicated with a note from Daoud. “Our country has often been saved by courageous women. You are one of them. With my admiration, Kamel.” Still, Dehdouh warned her not to read the book as it might be too emotionally heavy for her.
Arbane didn’t read it right away, and she continued her friendship with Dehdouh. A few days later, Arbane recalls, Dehdouh left her son at her house. When she came to pick him up, they began again to talk about the book. Dehdouh suggested that Daoud might give Arbane’s information to a film-maker for a possible adaptation. Arbane, she said, might benefit from money from the film and that it would allow her to buy an apartment in Spain, where her husband had family.
“This confirmed my fears,” Arbane told me. Finally, she started to read the book. She says she didn’t sleep for the next three nights. “I felt betrayed, naked,” she told me. “The entire world was reading something that was mine.” Arbane’s relatives told me that her mental health deteriorated after the book came out. Daoud “slit her throat a second time”, a relative said.
After reading the book, Arbane contacted a cousin of her adoptive father’s, who was a lawyer. On her advice, she went to the hospital in Oran where she had seen Dehdouh and requested her file. The hospital did not hand it over. She lodged a complaint on 18 November, according to her French lawyers. The judge asked for the file, she says, but the hospital said they had not found it.
In total, Arbane’s lawyers count approximately 30 similarities between Arbane and “Aube” in the novel. Both Arbane and Aube are rare survivors of a terrorist attack in which their throats were slit. Both lost the ability to speak after the attack and could only whisper. Both received tracheostomies. Arbane’s biological parents were shepherds; Aube’s parents raised sheep. Just like Arbane, Aube describes being compared to Donald Duck and recalls how, for a time, she could only eat liquid food.
Like Arbane, Aube lives in Oran; one of the apartments she lived in (including the neighbourhood, building letter and floor) is described in passing in the book. Arbane was adopted by a former minister of health, herself an adoptee; Aube was adopted by a famous lawyer, herself an adoptee. Arbane’s adoptive mother never celebrated the Muslim festival of Eid, during which sheep are traditionally slaughtered. The same is true of Aube’s adoptive mother. Both Arbane and Aube attended a high school called the Lycée Colonel Lotfi, owned a hair salon, and love perfume and horses.
Arbane’s aunt, Fadhela Chenntouf, told me that although she and her niece were very close, when she read the novel, she discovered things about Arbane that she had never known. In the book, Aube’s tattoos recall her murdered family. Arbane also has a number of tattoos, including one that recalls her biological mother. “She never said that the tattoo had a meaning for her, but she told Aïcha Dehdouh,” said Chenntouf.
Arbane’s lawyers claim that she confided in her therapist about the difficulties she’d had when she discovered she was pregnant, as Aube does in the novel. Like Aube, Arbane had acquired three pills for a possible abortion, though abortion is illegal in Algeria. Like Aube, Arbane did not take the pills and gave birth to a child. Even the scar across their neck is the same length: 17cm.
* * *
Daoud’s response to the Arbane case shifted in the months after the publication of his novel. At first, in a 3 September interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Obs, he said he had been inspired by a “woman with a breathing tube, though she was not the only mutilated one”. This was some weeks before Arbane’s appearance on Algerian TV, in which she accused Daoud of having used her life story for the novel. The week after that, on 21 November 2024, Arbane’s Algerian lawyer, Fatima Benbraham, held a dramatic press conference, in which she announced that Arbane was suing Daoud and held up pictures of her scars. “He built his success on Saâda’s misery. For a second time, he strangled my client’s voice,” she said. “He stole her life, her story and her pain and he leaves her without any life at all.” The lawyer appeared on a TV talkshow to launch a highly personal attack on Daoud, his new life in France and his family. (Benbraham did not reply to a request for comment. Arbane changed lawyers in July 2025.)
Benbraham also filed a separate case against Daoud and Dehdouh on behalf of an association of victims of terrorism, on the ground that the book violated the 2005 reconciliation law which restricts discussion of the black decade. The law has only been invoked three times before, always in connection to political statements and never against a novelist.
After these developments, Daoud began to speak about Arbane in a different way. On 3 December 2024, almost two weeks after Benbraham’s press conference in Algiers, Daoud wrote an article in Le Point in which he referred to Arbane as a puppet of the Algerian government. “This victim of the civil war is being manipulated to achieve a goal: to kill a writer, defame his family and save the deal between this regime and these killers.” He continued: “Apart from the visible injury, there is no common ground between this woman’s unbearable tragedy and the character Aube.” In the same article, he claimed that Arbane’s story was well known in Oran, citing an article in a Dutch paper published two years before his book, though this article had only the barest outlines of her story. He did not acknowledge that he knew Arbane personally, nor that his wife had been her psychiatrist.
In February 2025, further evidence emerged that seemed to support Arbane’s claims. The French investigative outlet Mediapart revealed that the novel’s working title had been “Joie” or joy, a translation of the name Saâda. According to Mediapart, an earlier version of the text carried the following dedication: “To an extraordinary woman, the real heroine of this story.” (Daoud did not respond to Mediapart. Gallimard did not respond to several requests for comment.)
Last summer, I contacted Daoud over email. He responded almost immediately, thanking me for my interest. Over the next few months, we exchanged a few more brief emails. He declined to meet. The case that had been launched against him, he wrote, could not be fully understood without investigating “the abuses, mass arrests, the regime of terror, the suppression of the press and multiple imprisonments in Algeria”.
In recent years, Algeria has become increasingly repressive. In 2019, a popular uprising called the Hirak movement fought against the possible fifth term of president Abdelaziz Bouteflika. It was a broad movement: “Men and women, all classes, all political backgrounds as well,” according to Mouloud Boumghar, a law professor who has worked extensively on human rights in Algeria. But it was crushed with the beginning of the Covid lockdowns.
Bouteflika resigned in 2019 and died in 2021. Since 2019, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who had served in various roles in Bouteflika’s cabinet, has been president. Today, Boumghar says, no one can stand out, no voice can speak up without risking prison. “The regime once clamped down more intelligently,” he says. Now, “it’s brutal”. Since President Tebboune came to power, Daoud wrote to me, almost “no press conference, no debate, no media or partisan campaign has been allowed outside official communications”. Dozens, even hundreds of people have been arrested. “Influencers, activists, publishers, singers, military personnel, opponents.” In France, the persecution of the French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal has attracted particular attention. In 2025, Sansal, a critic of the Algerian regime, was sentenced to five years in prison for “attacking national unity”. President Macron stated that that Algeria was “dishonouring” itself in imprisoning the writer.
Daoud was not always such an outspoken critic of the Algerian government. For much of his career, according to his former editor Hadjadj, Daoud “wasn’t an ally of power, but he wasn’t an opponent”. He pointed out that President Tebboune had chosen to grant a rare interview to Daoud and a colleague at Le Point in 2021. But in the years that followed, as the government became increasingly repressive, Daoud intensified his writings against the regime, and the regime seemed to turn on him. In Le Point, Daoud described how, after he hosted Macron in Oran in 2022, guests at their dinner were “subjected to legal harassment” and the restaurant owner was forced to close his establishment for some time. “I myself faced online harassment, troll farms and surveillance.” As Franco-Algerian relations deteriorated, he felt that “the machine was about to close in on me. I am a writer, French-speaking, Arabic-speaking, independent and unique. I was called a ‘traitor’.”
In August 2023, Daoud received a phone call from the head of the secret service in Oran. He asked whether Daoud could stop by his office for coffee. “The invitation ‘to come have a coffee’ is always the prelude to an arrest in Algeria,” Daoud later wrote. Shortly thereafter, he and his family left Algeria for Paris. “When we arrived in Paris at 6am, in summer, I immediately started writing Houris, as though it were a sacred dictation.”
Since Arbane launched her legal action, Algeria has issued two international arrest warrants for Daoud; in June, he cancelled a trip to Italy out of fear of extradition. Daoud told me that, unable to return to Algeria, he has recently missed his mother’s funeral. He has pointed to the virulence of the Algerian state’s response as an explanation for the current affair. In his email to me, Daoud noted that many of the individuals who had propagated and backed the case against him had ties to the regime, suggesting that this was further evidence of a state-led campaign against him. (Arbane’s lawyers in France have filed another suit, for libel, against Daoud and the newspaper Le Figaro for a statement in which he dismissed the idea that Arbane had a case of her own and suggested that she was a tool of the Algerian state. Arbane says that she does not follow politics.)
In his emails, Daoud did not address Arbane’s specific accusations, but stated that “the character Aube is imagined, a pure fiction”. In December, I sent him a detailed list of questions relating to specific claims in this article. In response, I received an email from his lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont-Haïk, who said she and her colleagues had provided long and detailed legal submissions to the court, as well as evidence showing that “Madame Arbane’s story goes against reality”. She did not offer anything specific. When I wrote again in February to ask whether she would share this evidence, she did not reply.
* * *
Among the literary community in Algeria, the Arbane-Daoud legal battle has been viewed with a certain ambivalence. Daoud is a polarising figure in his home country, and as he has gained readers in France, he has lost admirers in Algeria. Faris Lounis, an Algerian literary critic who has written extensively about Daoud, believes he is successful because he tells French conservatives what they want to hear. “The Algerian writer has to be useful,” he told me. (Lounis cited a column where Daoud accused French Muslims of being “useful idiots” for the French left.) In his columns in Le Point, Daoud often criticises Algeria – a fact that is interpreted differently, several people told me, coming from a writer who now lives in France. Another Algerian reader described Daoud’s columns to me in this way: “It’s Arabs, Muslims, Arabs, Muslims, morning, noon and night – that’s only a slight caricature.”
And although Houris was well received in France, its reception among Algerian readers and scholars of the country has been more complicated. Tristan Leperlier, a scholar of novels of the black decade, has described Houris as a “heavily political novel, bogged down in cliched images, caricaturing oppressed yet heroic women and violent imams”. Leperlier and others point out that numerous books and films in Algeria have been made about the civil war, many of them by women, something Daoud has largely passed over in interviews.
Yet no one disputes that the Algerian state really has made life impossible for Daoud. According to Lounis, “There’s the use of Saâda Arbane’s story [by Daoud] … That’s one fact. And there’s another: the instrumentalisation of the case by the Algerian state.” “He’s living through something absolutely terrible,” says Hadjadj, who described the Algerian media campaign against Daoud as a “lynching”. But, he notes, it has ended up “overshadowing Saâda’s story”.
* * *
In France, the Daoud case almost immediately got mixed up with that of Sansal, said Elisabeth Philippe, a prominent literary critic and an editor at Le Nouvel Observateur. “Very quickly, we made it into a political issue,” she told me. From that point on, it was inevitable that the story would be swirled together with the rancorous public conversation about the Franco-Algerian relationship, which, in France today, almost always ends up becoming a conversation about Islam and immigration. To take one example of many: on French TV in June, during a discussion about Boualem Sansal, the contrarian writer Pascal Bruckner called Algerians a “brainless people”. “They kicked us out,” he said, “and now they want to come here.”
Amid the furore, Houris has sold over 450,000 copies and English rights have been bought. In July, when Daoud appeared on the radio station France Inter, the conversation was dominated by the jailing of the Algerian writer Sansal. The question about Arbane focused on Daoud’s feelings, rather than the substance of her allegations. “Between these legal trials, Boualem Sansal’s fate in prison, the pain of exile, but also the recognition you have achieved as a popular writer, how did you live through and cross this year full of headwinds?” (Sansal was released from prison in November 2025.)
The legal case in France is still ongoing. Arbane’s French lawyers have focused on the question of privacy infringement. They seem to have precedent on their side. Thirteen years ago, William Bourdon, the lawyer for Arbane, won a case against a French author who was found to have used details about her husband’s former partner in a novel. She and her editor had to pay €40,000 in compensation. Arbane’s case in Algeria appears to have stalled. Her lawyer there did not respond to multiple requests for comment. One source, a journalist, speculated that the Algerian authorities may be waiting for the outcome of the case in France.
Daoud has built his career on his singularity: an Algerian man from a small town who ended up rewriting a Nobel laureate, a writer who can speak to both an Algerian audience and a French one. In a short book published last year, he described his pride at being “unfaithful to rigidity, to fixity … a proponent of plurality, multiplicity, variance and wandering”. The book’s title is Sometimes, One Must Betray.
But pushing against an authoritarian regime, which requires a stubborn self-belief, can impose its own kind of rigidity. In our exchanges, Daoud presented himself as fighting against a larger Algerian machine. “I attempted to illustrate the long process of healing that ‘Aube’ courageously undertook, but which Algeria itself rejects; instead, it is the writer who is criminalised for his work, while those responsible for Algeria’s bloody decade enjoy pensions and total impunity.”
Houris is a novel about sacrifice. Aube describes herself as an unwitting sacrifice of both the terrorists of the civil war and the modern state. She compares herself and her injury to that of animals slaughtered during the religious festival of Eid. Daoud appears to be asking about the sacrifices that victims of the civil war have been asked to make in order for the Algerian state to move forward. What have modern Algerians been asked to conceal, to forget, to suppress for the sake of their country? In our exchanges, he suggested that he, too, had sacrificed. To write about the civil war, he said, was to expose himself to danger. “The period is taboo; whoever talks about it risks going to jail.”
To write someone’s story, as Arbane alleges, is to demand a different kind of sacrifice. Over and over, in reading Daoud’s many responses to the legal cases, I noted how Arbane, her claims, her person, were absent from his view of the work he had done. For each specific point raised about Arbane, Daoud’s response would turn to the crisis in Algeria, or the forgotten civil war, deflecting questions about a single, living woman with comments about 200,000 dead.
Towards the end of Houris, Aube returns to Had Chekala, “to the heart of her own story”. The novel’s plot, until then tightly controlled, appears to unravel. The pace speeds, the characters take on the sheen of allegory. The village is filled with mysterious donkey heads. An imam in a mosque is also a butcher. It is implied that he and his twin brother participated in violent acts during the war. Aube is attacked and tied up in a shed. But before her throat is cut one last time, she is saved unexpectedly by Aïssa.
In the midst of all this, Aube tries to speak but she cannot produce a sound. Her voice “rustles like crumpled leaves” and “scatters in handfuls of sand”. She begins to cry. Why did she come all of this way only to find herself locked away? Why is she the only survivor who seeks the truth about the war? She thinks to herself, “I was an offering wondering what the point of its sacrifice had been.”
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