The House on Butterfly Street

A Novel

By Mhani Alaoui

About this book

In a country where the precarious rights of women and children can be reversed in an instant, legacies of resilience still reverberate across time.

Present-day Morocco: With the breakdown of her marriage, physician Nadine Alam has become unable to work. Her teenage daughter Al has retreated into silence, and now her young housekeeper Ghalia has disappeared.

One morning, Nadine receives an envelope from an unidentified sender. Inside it is a newspaper clipping, an article about a single mother and her newborn child, a boy named Noor—typically a name given to girls, meaning light. Nadine’s country is one where single mothers and children born out of wedlock are considered pariahs, outside the protection of the law. Why would a journalist disclose the child’s name? And why was she sent this clipping?

Drawn to these mysteries, Nadine embarks on a search that takes her into a Casablanca she barely knew existed. There she encounters strong, inspiring people but also deeply flawed, terrible ones. Unraveling clues to her connection with the story, she is moved to try to help this mother and child. As she plunges deeper and deeper into an unknown world, Nadine finds she must come to terms with her own family’s history, and with lingering scars of her country’s past in which her family is entwined.

A vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a Casablanca household.