La cité écarlate

La Cité écarlate is Sami Mokaddem's debut — a collection of short stories, first published in 2013, that introduced the voice which would go on to define much of contemporary Tunisian genre fiction. Ranging across the fantastic, the uncanny, and the darkly speculative, the stories share the author's fascination with hidden histories, secret societies, and the thin membrane between the everyday and the strange.

Written and first circulated in the era of online serialisation, the collection blends thriller pacing with fantastical and mythological imagery, sketching the recurring preoccupations — Carthage, masks, buried secrets, the pull of the irrational — that Mokaddem would later expand into his novels.

A compact, atmospheric entry point into the work of one of Tunisia's most popular authors of the fantastic.