داموس الكريطة

Pages: 308
Published: 2022
Language: Arabic

Moving between past and present, داموس الكريطة (Damous El Karita) follows a group of friends bound together since childhood by relationships as contradictory as they are deep — friendship shading into love, affection tangled with rivalry and resentment. Its guiding idea is that the child we once were never truly leaves us: it goes on living inside the adults we become, shaping how we love, betray, and remember.

At the heart of the novel stands the underground gallery of the Basilica of Damous El Karita, one of the great early-Christian ruins of Carthage, which becomes the silent witness to what happened among these friends there — a place where the buried past and the present finally meet.

Sami Mokaddem turns from genre thriller toward something more intimate and reflective, using a real Tunisian landmark as the setting for a story about memory, friendship, and the long reach of childhood.

Prose complexity: 7/10

Reflective Nostalgic Emotional Melancholic

Crime Historical Fiction Mystery Thriller Literary Fiction Political Thriller Contemporary Literature Drama

Sami Mokaddem

Sami Mokaddem (Arabic: سامي المقدم) is a Tunisian novelist, born 5 July 1982 in El Menzah, Tunis. He studied at the Institut des Hautes Études Commerciales de Carthage and worked as a company director before turning to fiction. He writes in both French and Arabic, publishing thrillers steeped in Tunisian and Carthaginian history and myth. His French-language "Carthage trilogy" — Dix-neuf (2014), Le Sang des anges (2017) and Le Secret des Barcides (2020) — won the Comar d'Or "Discovery" prize and...