'Our meagre literature has known no greater story, nor witnessed a more beautiful ruin' Self-exiled in Paris, after losing an arm in the Algerian war of liberation and becoming disillusioned with the corruption of his newly independent country, the narrator Khaled has taken up painting as a form of therapy. Many years later, at an exhibition of his work in Paris, he is visited by Hayat, the daughter of a close friend and legendary fighter who had given his life for the revolt. Khaled, who had known Hayat as a child, now falls for the woman she has become and for her chosen art as a novelist. Hayat, who he sees as the manifestation of his home city of Constantine, makes him forget his French girlfriend and for the first time in years start to confront his feelings about Algeria. He is rivaled in his affections, however, by a Palestinian poet and by a senior-ranking government official who Hayat eventually decides to marry. The events of this award-winning novel centre around Algeria's struggle against foreign domination and the turmoil that followed its independence from France in the 1960s. The first in a series of three books that span more than five decades of Algerian history, Memory in the Flesh is a lyrical and nostalgic memoir of love and loss.