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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.

Spring Update

The Dream Hotel had a dream launch, much to my relief and delight. It received excellent reviews, including in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, NPR’s Fresh Air, Vulture, the Guardian, and the Irish Times. The Washington Post Book World put the book on its cover, with a review by Francine Prose. In March, Harper’s published an excerpt from it. The Economist named it one of

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Published on May 02, 2025 10:36
Average rating: 3.83 · 65,788 ratings · 10,022 reviews · 21 distinct worksSimilar authors
Season of Migration to the ...

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3.72 avg rating — 32,573 ratings — published 1966 — 77 editions
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The Dream Hotel

3.62 avg rating — 22,305 ratings — published 2025 — 12 editions
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The Other Americans

3.90 avg rating — 19,053 ratings — published 2019 — 3 editions
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The Moor's Account

4.04 avg rating — 12,666 ratings — published 2014 — 33 editions
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Conditional Citizens: On Be...

4.27 avg rating — 4,180 ratings — published 2020
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Hope and Other Dangerous Pu...

3.73 avg rating — 3,019 ratings — published 2005
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Secret Son

3.51 avg rating — 1,705 ratings — published 2009 — 15 editions
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The Decameron Project: 29 N...

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3.56 avg rating — 1,625 ratings — published 2020 — 23 editions
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The Writer's Library: The A...

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3.78 avg rating — 1,226 ratings — published 2020 — 9 editions
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Ploughshares Spring 2024 Gu...

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4.27 avg rating — 11 ratings
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Laila’s Recent Updates

Laila Lalami wrote a new blog post

Spring Update

The Dream Hotel had a dream launch, much to my relief and delight. It received excellent reviews, including in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Read more of this blog post »
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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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