Amin Maalouf – The First Century After Beatrice

I have just finished reading Amin Maalouf’s “The First Century After Beatrice” and as it was one of those books you can’t just set aside after turning the last page and continue your daily routine, I thought of sharing with you how much I liked it.

Amin Maalouf for those who didn’t read for him before is a Lebanese writer, currently living in France. He worked in the field of Journalism which permitted him to travel to different places. Then he decided to concentrate on literature. He wrote some non fiction such as The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (VERY RECOMMENDED!!), and many fiction novels, such as Leo Africanus Samarkand,,,etc. Most of his novels can be considered Historical Fiction as he bases the main lines on actual events.

In The First Century After Beatrice, Amin Maalouf mixed between his indepth social analysis style and documentation, but instead of writing about the past, the narrator in this story is telling events in the future (the first decades of the 21st century). The main theme of the novel is the spread of a drug that gives the parents the possibility of choosing having a baby boy and not a girl. And because this is the dream of so many cultures through out history, this drug was spread worldwide, resulting in a disastrous imbalance in the demography ratio between male and female. And suddenly, all of the buried fears of going extinct and the hate towards one another exploded!!

Not a very pleasant future, hein!

For more info:
Amin Maalouf Blog: http://www.aminmaalouf.net/en/
Amazon review: http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Century-After-Beatrice/dp/0349105995