The book became so significant you might even say there is a “before Kiffe Kiffe” and an “after Kiffe Kiffe” on France’s literary landscape. Despite her early success, Guène’s path hasn't been easy. Like many French-born children of immigrants from former French colonies, Guène always felt she was viewed as a second-class citizen. And that novel, Kiffe Kiffe Demain (Just Like Tomorrow), would then be published in 2004, to great acclaim. To date, it has sold 400,000 copies in France alone and it is now even used as reading material in high schools.

The Arab immigrant community Doria lives in is rich with all the good and bad aspects of their culture: parties, foods, henna, yes, but also heavy restrictions on women and girls, and Guène, herself the child of Algerian immigrants, also grew up in the projects just outside Paris, lending Doria's experiences the ring of gritty truth. You don't have to know much about French history or culture, because Guène explains it all for you beautifully, but if you do know from the Algerian war and the current racism in the banlieues, there's an added layer here to savor. When France wins the final against Croatia, the camera pans across a multi-ethnic crowd, all cheering for their country. Ly won the 2019 Cannes Festival jury prize for Les Miserables and the film went on to be nominated for best international feature film.But for the moment he says he is focusing on his job at Parisian publishing house Latte s, where has been appointed head of a literary imprint .

Guène finds the images from these matches, 20 years apart, enlightening. Ladj Ly’s scene on the Champs Elysees “means so much more than just the match; [it] represents an ideal of what the spirit of unity should be,” she says. Translated, it's a very easy read, basically YA, though for a reader of French around A-Level standard, the slang will take a bit of getting used to. Subject-wise, it technically has that realist 'worthiness' characteristic of the IFFP - it's about an impoverished French-Moroccan teenage girl living on a tough estate on the outskirts of Paris - but it's not in the least dry, so 'worthy' wasn't an adjective that occurred to me until afterwards. This book didn't exist when I was doing A-levels, but Kiffe Kiffe plus an older classic would be a better choice than two of the latter, and certainly gives a less rarefied view of France than the likes of Marcel Pagnol. Guillaume Allary, one of Guène’s editors at the time, who has since founded his own publishing company on Paris’ Right Bank, recalled that in 2004 “there were no voices coming from the banlieues [suburbs]…The book arrived in that heavy silence in a very white, very inward-looking, Parisian literary milieu that was ignorant about a large part of the French population.Why did you put the matriarch Yamina, whose French-born children are nourished and overwhelmed by a love that “overflows like the Mediterranean”, at the heart of your book? In 2017, Mahir Guven, a young French writer of Turkish and Kurdish origin, followed in Guene's footsteps by writing a book about the difficulty immigrants, and ­ especially those who are Muslim , had integrat ing into French society. Last year, that novel, titled Grand Fre re (Older Brother), won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. The English version, translated by Tina Kover, was released on Tuesday. Involuntarily, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my identity. I would have preferred to spend more time thinking about my literature.” Inherited shame It] alludes to 1998, when the socio-political context was very different. It’s as if, in the 2018 image, you realised that the victory, the joy, and elation weren’t enough to make you believe [in unity].