Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter

With a foreword by Lakhdar Brahimi, this gripping insider’s account chronicles how and why the author, as a young French-educated woman in 1950s Algiers, joined the armed wing of Algeria’s national liberation movement to combat her country’s French occupiers. When the movement’s leaders, driven underground by the French security services, turned to Drif and her female colleagues to conduct attacks in retaliation for French aggression against the local population, they leapt at the chance, engraving their names among Algeria’s most iconic historical figures. (Their actions were later portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo’s famed film “The Battle of Algiers”.)

When first published in French in 2013, this intimate memoir met with great acclaim—and...