I’ll Take the Fire

Synopsis

Q: If your house was burning down, what would you take with you?
A: I’d take the fire.

This is the story of two sisters, Mia and Inés. Two girls enveloped in love, trapped by the social conventions of Casablanca at the dawn of the twenty-first century and silenced by the political ‘truths’ that envelop their lives.

Mia – the eldest, a warrior and a pariah, her sexuality a matter of scorn, something to be erased.

Inés – the youngest, a woman trying to carve out an identity in a Paris that derides and erases her, with no way back to Morocco, a homeland to which her father has warned her never to return, for her own sake.

As these sisters struggle to find a home – a place of safety and love that holds rather than binds – their lives as framed by their mothers and grandmothers before them will be a battle for their hearts and souls, and one they take on with every sinew of their being.

‘We feel deeply for the family caught in the middle of the conflict of history.’ SALMAN RUSHDIE, on The Country of Others

Author

Leila Slimani is the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny, one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018, for which she became the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt. Her other books include Adèle, Sex and Lies, and the #1 international bestsellers In the Country of Others and Watch Us Dance, which are the first and second parts of a trilogy of novels based on her family’s roots in revolutionary Morocco. Slimani is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture, and is the chair of the jury for the 2023 International Booker Prize. She was ranked #2 on Vanity Fair France’s annual list of the Fifty Most Influential French People in the World. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she divides her time between France and Portugal.