The Matchmaker’s Notebook – A Novel

When Rania Talbi receives a phone call in a university corridor in Algiers, her world tilts. Her grandmother, Hadja Baya Talbi, has been murdered in her home in the old Souika quarter of Constantine. Rania barely knew the woman. She was not raised in Constantine. She was not part of that world.

But she is about to be.

Because Baya was not just a grandmother. For fifty years she was Constantine’s most powerful matchmaker, the woman who arranged the marriages that bound the city’s great families together. Her weapon was a notebook: a leather-bound ledger written in ink that smelled of cloves and rosewater, recording every match, every negotiation, every secret revealed in confidence by families desperate to secure the right union. Who was actually related to whom. Whose money came from where. Whose reputation was built on a lie.

When Rania inherits the notebook, she discovers that her grandmother’s web of connections reaches into the highest levels of Algerian society, and that the marriages Baya arranged were not always acts of love. Some were acts of strategy. Some were acts of concealment. And at least one was an act of war.

Now the same people who feared Baya alive fear her notebook more. And they are coming for it.

Alternating between present-day Constantine and five decades of Algerian history, The Matchmaker’s Notebook is a layered literary thriller about the invisible architectures of power, the things families will do to protect their secrets, and a young woman who must decide whether the truth is worth the price of knowing it.