The Book of Algerian Monsters – A Novel

Malek Bouzid was once the University of Oran’s foremost folklore scholar. Now he sits in his underwear at three in the afternoon, marking papers that aren’t his, in a two-room apartment where he and his sixteen-year-old daughter Yasmine eat lentils four nights a week. His career is over. His reputation is ash.

Then a package arrives. No return address. Inside, wrapped in pre-colonial archival cloth, is a handwritten manuscript from 1843: a complete catalogue of supernatural creatures, spirits, guardians, and terrors from across Algeria, compiled by a scholar whose name has been erased from history.

Every wilaya has a creature. Every creature is real. And someone wants Malek to prove it.

What follows is an epic road trip across all 58 Algerian wilayas: from the Mediterranean coast to the Sahara, from the Kabyle mountains to the Tassili caves, from cities of millions to villages of twelve. Malek, Yasmine, and their unflappable driver Boudj travel by Hyundai Terracan through a country most novels have never touched, interviewing shepherds and grandmothers, well-masters and rangers, horsewomen and divers, collecting stories of the creatures that Algerians have always known were there but modern scholarship refused to see.

Part folklore anthology, part father-daughter redemption story, part love letter to a country that contains multitudes, The Book of Algerian Monsters asks: What if the monsters in the grandmother stories were not metaphors? What if the land itself remembers?