Century of Locusts

What first appears as a tiny moving shadow, no bigger than a fly, on the dazzling horizon slowly reveals itself as the grim shape of violence and death; in the destruction left behind―the mother’s broken body, the hidden child, the crying infant―begins the story of wandering and loss, of exile and desolation that sounds all the sad echoes of disappearing Bedouin life. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, Malika Mokeddem’s Century of Locusts combines the magic of exquisitely wrought desert landscapes, the intrigue of Bedouin tales of madmen and poets, and the personal pain of exile and isolation to evoke a way of life destroyed by the scourge of settler colonialism.

The book tells the braided tales of those left...