Behind closed doors, North African home cooks are taking the region's food to new heights. Traditional dishes such as tagines, stews, soups, and salads are being adapted and refined, and new dishes are being created using classic ingredients such as fiery spices, jewel-like dried fruits, lemons, and armfuls of fresh herbs.

The North African Kitchen is the result of Fiona Dunlop's long fascination with the region. She visits eight of the best home cooks in Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya, shopping and cooking with them, and learning their favorite recipes and cooking tricks.

Simplicity is at the heart of the private medina kitchen. The exotic fuses with the domestic to produce dishes that are highly flavored yet quick and easy to prepare. Tunisian cuisine is perhaps the hottest of the region- due in large part to the popularity of the fiery chili paste harissa. As well as a strong French influence, pasta is a passion in Tunisia. Morocco's great forte is its tagines and sauces- with meat and fish being cooked in one of four popular sauces. And Libya, although less gastronomically subtle than Tunisia and Morocco, excels in soups and patisserie.

This culinary journey creates a vivid and sensual picture of how food is really shopped for and cooked in the private kitchens of some of the world's most extraordinary gastronomic cultures.

"I came to the Sahara to be buried."

After witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center, Jeehan Nathaar leaves her New York life with her sense of identity fractured and her American dream destroyed. She returns to Morocco to make her home with a family that's not her own. Healed by their kindness but caught up in their troubles, Jeehan struggles to move beyond the pain and confusion of September 11th. On this desiccated landscape, thousands of miles from Ground Zero, the Dune sings of death, love, and forgiveness.

This volume covers the countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria and is written by an expert on the area. It provides a concise and readable history of the region's journey from its earliest beginnings right up to the politics and life of the present day.

An exciting debut and a wonderful work of magical realism.

Outside of time, the legendary storyteller and queen Sheherazade tells a little girl a story that has happened and is yet to happen, the rebirth of a story ancient and forgotten. Dreams of Maryam Tair: Blue Boots and Orange Blossoms brings readers to a Casablanca of myth and metaphor; curses and student revolts; and of witches, demons, djinns, and bureaucrats. Long after Biblical Adam set aside forgotten first-wife Lilith for Eve, star-crossed highborn Leila and scholar Adam catch the attention of the demons during Casablanca's 1981 Bread Riots, and are disappeared. Months later- after centuries in the demons' lair- Adam and Leila reunite at her parents' once grand and now cursed house as shadows of themselves. But Leila returns from her ordeal pregnant with a special, singular child, one who draws out magical beings and has the power to change everything. A daughter she named Maryam, born with the scent of orange blossoms and a body filled with pain.

Seamlessly interweaving a sprawling, multi-generational family tale with ancient creation stories, Mhani Alaoui's cyclical half-myth half-reality story celebrates the radical power of disobedience.

An evocative novel from the award-winning author of Dreams of Maryam Tair.

Aya Dane creates mixed media paintings and writes a diary in her studio above a strange, old Cambridge townhouse. There she lives alone, having left her childhood home in Tangiers. Though she has carved a name for herself in the art world, she allows herself just one close relationship, to an intimate companion named David.

One day, Aya receives a letter from a powerful, enigmatic patron, an invitation to submit her ultimate work to his collection. If he deems it worthy, he promises, her art will live on forever. Aya finds herself unable to resist the mysterious invitation, and challenge.

But as she begins to work on the commissioned painting, from her top-floor perch, the streets of Tangiers reappear to her. Their white-and-blue walls, purple bougainvillea, sweetness and sorrow bring back to life people and events she thought she'd left behind. Aya becomes haunted by forgotten scenes, only to discover that she herself is being painted, on a canvas from which it seems impossible to escape.