Horses of God

"When I was a kid our favorite game was to pour bowls of piss onto rich passersby, biting our lips as they cursed, yelled insults, and looked up at the sky." Thus begins this tale of four boys living in a Casablanca slum. They start off playing on a neighborhood soccer team (The Stars of Sidi Moumen) and end as suicide bombers strapped with "paradise belts." The novel's narrator, Yachine, is the ghost of one of the boys, and the novel moves quickly, never lingering too long on individual scenes, although life in the Moroccan shantytown is clearly portrayed. Moroccan painter, novelist, and former math teacher Binebine (Welcome to Paradise) writes with humor and pathos amid the novel's grinding tragedy but never allows the narrative to veer into self-pity or sentimentality. The book is based on the 2004 suicide bombings in Casablanca, and Binebine's unblinking eye for detail makes this a haunting tale.