Secret Son

by Laila Lalami

When a young man is given the chance to rewrite his future, he doesn't realize the price he will pay for giving up his past...

Casablanca's stinking alleys are the only home that nineteen-year-old Youssef El-Mekki has ever known. Raised by his mother in a one-room home, the film stars flickering on the local cinema's screen offer the only glimmer of hope to his frustrated dreams of escape. Until, that is, the father he thought dead turns out to be very much alive.

A high profile businessman with wealth to burn, Nabil is disenchanted with his daughter and eager to take in the boy he never knew. Soon Youssef is installed in his penthouse and sampling the gold-plated luxuries enjoyed by Casablanca's elite. But as he leaves the slums of his childhood behind him, he comes up against a starkly un-glittering reality...

Publisher: Viking

Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the "African Booker") in 2006 and for the National Book Critics' Circle Nona Balakian Award in 2009. She is the author of one short story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. This is her first novel.