This was an almost-dreamy read, the story of a French woman who has moved to a rundown rural plot of land with her Moroccan husband, while the fight for the independence of that country goes on in the background. I enjoyed it - there's a lovely tone to this - but I wondered at first if the independence storyline was rather too much in the background. Then I thought that it was probably a deliberate choice. By telling so much of the story through the experiences of Mathilde and her young daughter Aïcha, the story is almost reframed as a domestic drama, one where the cultural conflict going on in the background is played out in microcosm. And honestly, I think that's a clever choice. I certainly found it appealing, because it allows Slimani to explore gender roles particularly well and that's something that interests me. In a novel so influenced by colonisation, and by the different expectations of the French and Moroccan cultures, the domestic is as important a theatre as the political... if indeed they are not one and the same.