The Last One

By: Fatima Daas

Narrated by: Rasha Zamamiri

Drawn from the author’s experiences growing up in a Paris banlieue, this powerful, lyric debut explores the diverse, often conflicting facets of her identity—French, Algerian, Muslim, lesbian.

The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo, and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends more than three hours a day on public transportation to and from the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian manners. She goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy—her longest relationship. But as she gains distance from her family and comes into her own, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn’t know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing.

This extraordinary first novel, anchored and buoyed by the refrain “My name is Fatima,” is a vital portrait of a young woman finding herself in a modern world full of contradictions. Daas’s journey to living her sexuality in spite of expectations about who she should be offers a powerful perspective on the queer experience.

©2020 Les éditions Noir sur Blanc. Originally published in French as La petite dernière in 2020 by Les éditions Noir sur Blanc, Paris and Lausanne. Translation copyright © 2021 by Lara Vergnaud (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Beautiful

The story was beautiful and the narrator did a wonderful job. Her voice was stunning. I never realized how pleasing the Arabic language is to the ear.