The shocking scenes of sexual violence and murder that set Hamza Koudri’s debut novel Sand Roses in motion belie the romantic and soft impression created by the title. Sand Roses is a historical novel about the semi-nomadic Ouled Nail group in Algeria whose women are trained as dancers—but are also forced into sex work by the community at an early age. The novel follows twin sisters, dancers Salima and Fahima, who eke out a living in the town of Bousaada at the height of French colonialism, and inadvertently find themselves at the center of the violence of the French army.  A surprising aspect of the novel is that it is written in English, a unique twist in the long literary history of French and Arabic language production associated with Algeria. Koudri belongs to a small but new generation of writers who have begun to embrace the English language and culture….

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