Community Reads: Rowan Allen on "How to Leave the World" by Marouane Bakthi
Get to know our community and their reading highlights.
We’re launching Community Reads, a new section where fellow readers from our community can share their favourite books or what they are currently reading.
Got a book you love? Tell us about it! Send us the title, a short text (it could be a summary, a quote, why you picked it or your personal thoughts—whatever helps others get a feel for it), plus a photo. Drop us a DM—we can’t wait to hear from you.
To kick things off, Rowan Allen shares the first Community Read. Check out her pick below!
Title: How to Leave the World
Author: Marouane Bakthi
Translation: from the French, by Lara Vergnaud
Publisher: Divided Publishing
“I'm always interested to see what Divided publishes and I was drawn to the blurb of this one: 'Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.‘
I am currently reading this and I admire how the prose is so exposed and unadorned while inking a narrative on the complex and conflicting emotionality of identity, desire and discovery. It feels dissociative and smudged and also like poetry. It's a short book, a good one, recommended.
Bought from Zabriskie bookshop; non-stock, but they're happy to order it in for you.”
—Rowan Allen