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Laila Lalami

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Laila Lalami

Goodreads Author


Born
Morocco
Website

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Member Since
September 2008


Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.

Introducing The Dream Hotel

If you have a smartphone, you’ll no doubt have had a moment when you realized that it knew more about you than you’d ever expected. Even though you’ve agreed to the terms of service, it still feels like a terrible violation of privacy. I wanted to push this technological surveillance to the limit in my new novel, The Dream Hotel. The story follows Sara Hussein, a museum archivist and busy mom who

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Published on February 17, 2025 13:17
Average rating: 3.92 · 47,480 ratings · 6,834 reviews · 19 distinct worksSimilar authors
Season of Migration to the ...

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3.72 avg rating — 31,555 ratings — published 1966 — 43 editions
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The Other Americans

3.90 avg rating — 18,466 ratings — published 2019 — 24 editions
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The Moor's Account

4.04 avg rating — 12,318 ratings — published 2014 — 37 editions
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The Dream Hotel

3.70 avg rating — 5,323 ratings — published 2025 — 10 editions
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Conditional Citizens: On Be...

4.27 avg rating — 3,990 ratings — published 2020 — 6 editions
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Hope and Other Dangerous Pu...

3.73 avg rating — 2,922 ratings — published 2005 — 20 editions
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Secret Son

3.51 avg rating — 1,678 ratings — published 2009 — 16 editions
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The Decameron Project: 29 N...

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3.56 avg rating — 1,589 ratings — published 2020 — 5 editions
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The Writer's Library: The A...

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3.78 avg rating — 1,210 ratings — published 2020 — 9 editions
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Ploughshares Spring 2024 Gu...

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4.30 avg rating — 10 ratings
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Laila’s Recent Updates

Laila Lalami wrote a new blog post

Introducing The Dream Hotel

If you have a smartphone, you’ll no doubt have had a moment when you realized that it knew more about you than you’d ever expected. Even though you’ve Read more of this blog post »
More of Laila's books…
Quotes by Laila Lalami  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“No lies are more seductive than the ones we use to console ourselves.”
Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.”
Laila Lalami, The Other Americans

“A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.”
Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

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message 1: by Roger

Roger Cottrell HI Laila,
I'm really glad that you got back. Your work sounds fantastic. I'm currently working on a political thriller set in Iran but will be starting one shortly based in Algeria. A French middle class filmmaker of Algerian origin gets permission to go to Algeria (during the civil conflict) to make a sequel to the classic movie The Battle of Algiers. He's also trying to find out what happened to his friend from University, a Kabyle Berber who was a staunch Stalinist before the collapse of the USSR who seems to have become an oil executive then been killed by Islamicist terrorists. The protagonist falls for his friend's sister then begins to realise that he isn't actually dead. Thematically, it's a remake of The Third Man by Carrol Reed, Graham Greene and Orson Wells with "Harry Lime" manipulating Islamic terrorism to drive the indigenous Berber population out of an oil rich part of Kabyle.


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