'The Meursault Investigation' takes on the weighty task of re-telling the story at the heart of Albert Camus's 'The Stranger' from the perspective of the brother of the anonymous Arab victim, Harun, many years later. Musa's murder becomes the determining event in Harun's life, overshadowed as he is by both Meursault's famous book *and* his mother's boundless grief for her (better) lost son. Though Mother's relentless harassment of Harun does get a bit monotonous, it's important to a post-Algerian Indpendence plot development that brings Harun and Meursault closer in their actions and outlook. Ultimately if Camus's narrator escapes the absurdity of God's judgment by insisting on his exemption, Daoud's narrator cannot quite bring himself to deny the existence of a higher power. Read together these two books are rich with food for thought about religion, justice, government, and what humans owe to one another.

Don't miss this thought-provoking piece on Daoud and contemporary Algeria: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/magazine/stranger-still.html.