Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us

One of the best books I've read so far this year.

A fictionalized account of the last days of Algerian revolutionary Fernand Iveton before the French executed him in 1957, one of 198 rebels France executed during the Algerian Civil War. The prose is lush and lyrical and despite the book's brevity, one feels that one has finished a denser piece of work than 118 pages.

Andras embeds the reader in the life of Fernand Iveton and his wife Helene, and in Fernand's plight as a condemned man, through alternating vignettes of his days in custody and his life before that, centering on his relationship with his wife. What emerges is a nuanced and empathetic picture of a character living under the repression of a colonial state, and how a person in such a state might find political violence reasonable, even necessary.

The end, when it comes, is like the arrival of a guillotine blade, short, shocking and devastatingly powerful. Bravo.