A A Waltz

A prize-winning novel from one of Algeria’s rising literary stars

InA Waltz, Lynda Chouiten depicts an irreverent and creative woman with an artistic temperament navigating the stiflingly conservative society in which she was raised. The narrative follows the path of Chahira, a seamstress from El Moudja—a fictional small coastal town in the Kabyle region of Algeria—to an international design competition in Vienna. Along the way,A Waltz expresses the strain of competing value systems, regional identities and expectations, and a cacophony of voices bearing down upon one woman while asking challenging questions about the nature of madness, confinement, and resistance to a patriarchal world.