The Black Crescent by Jane Johnson

 

As a child in his native Moroccan mountain village, Hamou Badi stumbles across a corpse dumped unceremoniously by a dried-up river bed. It's a random event which influences his life, for his desire to give this dead person some dignity and justice leads him, later in life, to join the Surete, the police force of the French colonialists who rule the country. 

He hopes this way he can help people and make things better for them but as the 1950s progress, Moroccan demands for freedom become more violent and the French response increasingly aggressive and ruthless. Hamou is caught between the two, in a position which is rapidly becoming untenable.

It's also a love story, with Hamou finding himself in a similar quandary. His mother prefers the old traditional ways to make a match for her son - to talk to her neighbours, and find a suitable bride, whereas Hamou finds himself attracted to the daughter of his Casablanca neighbours, a modern relatively independent women, working as a nurse, and running dangerous errands at night.     

The Black Crescent is definitely a page-turner of a read, set in a period of comparatively recent history about which I suspect most readers will know little.  

With input from her Moroccan husband, the author has crafted an incredibly atmospheric novel capturing the sights of sounds of 1950s Morocco from ancient hill village where life seems quiet and almost unchanged in hundreds of years to the modern bustle of Casablanca, from the crowded older parts of the city where the poorest workers live, to the luxurious seaside villas of the French colonialists. 

The Granite Kingdom: a Cornish journey by Tim Hannigan

 Tim Hannigan is a travel writer known for covering far flung destinations such as Indonesia. This time though he's looking at somewhere much closer to home - to his native Cornwall. 

Starting at the Tamar, the traditional boundary separating Cornwall from the rest of England, his journey zig zags from coast to coast heading towards the furthest point of Land's End. It's a journey that could be made in under two hours by car (according to Google Maps, and making allowances for holiday traffic) but this is a slower winding way, mainly on foot, taking the reader up and over empty, boggy moorland and the spoil tips of China clay works, down to tourist-packed hotspots and quiet seaside villages, from places which sound quintessentially English to those with a definite flavour of Brittany in their names. 

Along the way, the author discusses the geology of the area, its history, tries to pin down what exactly makes Cornwall different to the rest of the country, and what it means to be Cornish, while putting paid to a lot of the myths about King Arthur, wreckers, and smugglers. 

Hannigan's own personal history weaves around that of the inhabitants of, and visitors to, this remote-seeming peninsula - of the Neolithic builders of burial cairns, Phoenician tin traders, the early 'tourists' venturing into a barren, desolate area, or, more recently, artists in search of its beauty, and holiday-makers searching for sun and surf.

For many of us Cornwall is the place of summer holidays, with Betjeman's 'Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea', or the setting for the novels of Daphne du Maurier and Winston Graham with rain-lashed moorlands and brooding heroes.The scenery is either balmy and idyllic, or dramatic and wild. It's not the post-industrial landscape of China clay workings and ruined engine houses left from tin mining. It's not the centre of sea trade with European neighbours, or the countryside that thousands left as work there dried up. But this is an insider's view, a behind-the-scenes-look at a place we think we know. Part travelogue, part history, I found this a fascinating read. Apart from a small area around Polzeath, I haven't visited Cornwall as an adult, and now I realise how little I know about the rest of the county. Time, I think, for me to plan a visit. Meanwhile, if you're heading down west this summer, have a read - it may open your eyes.