After his first novel, The Hen and Her Cumin, (JC Lattès, 2022), which was one of the finalists for the Goncourt for the first novel 2022 and appeared on the Academy’s “summer 2022 favorites” list Goncourt, Zineb Mekouar returns to us with “Remember the Bees”.
His second novel will be published on May 2, 2024. “It’s very small, a bee, very small, it shouldn’t die for a story of the earth drying up, it shouldn’t die, a bee; it’s like a sick child, a mother who no longer recognizes her son, these things shouldn’t exist; injustices that break everything inside, that knot the stomach and leave us breathless. Powerless. How to explain this to Anir? How?”.
Anir is ten years old. He loves the eagles that make large circles near the clouds and the stories his grandfather tells him, especially those concerning the Rucher du Saint – the oldest collective apiary in the world – perched on a mountainside in the High Atlas. . The young boy, under the overwhelming heat of southern Morocco, will learn to take care of bees and to love this red, arid, increasingly silent land. He has no idea that behind the legends of his village and his mother’s haunting lullaby lies a dark family secret. Zineb Mekouar was born in 1991 in Casablanca and has lived in Paris since 2009.
