CANCELED: “Our Riches” Book Discussion | Green Apple Books

Submitted by the Event Organizer

UPDATE: Due to COVID-19 concerns, this event has been canceled.

Join Algerian author Kaouther Adimi discusses his new novel “Our Riches” on Wednesday, April 15, 2020 at 7:30 pm.

Sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

Praise for Our Riches

“An understated, lyrical story of reading and resistance over the tumultuous generations.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred)

“Adimi’s confident prose displays Ryad and Charlot’s emotional depth while nimbly shuttling the reader through nearly a century of history. This is a moving tribute to the enduring power of literature.”—Publishers Weekly

“Fascinating: Adimi synthesizes the private minutiae of the great and sometimes forgotten publisher Edmond Charlot with the history of the times in a surprisingly light, almost breezy fashion, making this a fast, interesting, and engaging read.”—Adam Hocker, Albertine Bookstore

About Our Riches:

The powerful English debut of a rising young French star, Our Riches is a marvelous, surprising, hybrid novel about a beloved Algerian bookshop

Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto “by the young, for the young,” discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. Our Riches interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.

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