Wolf Dreams by Yasmina Khadra

How does a handsome young man who keeps company with poets and dreams of fame and fortune in the movie business become a brutal killer who massacres women and children without turning a hair? Wolf Dreams reveals this transformation in a novel of unflinching detail and commanding prose. The story follows Nafa Walid, heart-throb of the Casbah, as he gradually loses control of his destiny and becomes drawn into the Islamic Fundamentalist movement. Wolf Dreams illustrates how disappointment and disillusion, when they intersect with the persuasive voice of fundamentalism and the chaos of civil war, can transform a normal, middle-class young man into a mindless assassin; a man who inflicts pain and terror on others without qualms, and accepts the idea of his own death with devotion.

YASMINA KHADRA is the pseudonym of the Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul, who was born in 1956. A high ranking officer in the Algerian army, he went into exile in France in 2000, where he now lives in seclusion. In his several writings on the civil war in Algeria, Khadra exposes the current regime and the fundamentalist opposition as the joint guilty parties in the Algerian Tragedy. Before his admission of identity in 2001, a leading critic in France wrote: "A he or a she? It doesn't matter. What matters is that Yasmina Khadra is today one of Algeria's most important writers."

Read an article on Algeria by Janine di Giovanni

"The book that best describes how an Islamic Fundamentalist is formed."
New York Times

“Yasmina Khadra is one of the rare writers capable of giving a meaning to the violence in Algeria today.”
NEWSWEEK

“A writer who can understand man wherever he is…”
NEW YORK TIMES