Top 16 Books About Morocco Updated 04 /2024

It's true: long train and bus rides can put your bladder and your patience to the test from time to time. It's time to grab a book and settle in. We're going to Morocco.

You can get a sense of what it's like to live in a country by reading the books it has made.

and I've been known for a long time to always have a book in my hands.

I decided to put together all of the best things I found while living and reading about Morocco, so I could show them to you.

Books set in Morocco are some of the best, and these are some of them.

Hope and other dangerous pursuits – Laila Lalami

An illegal attempt to get into Spain by rubber lifeboat is told from the point of view of a group of people who made the journey. Some went to Spain, and some didn't.

Then, this tells you about four of them before they crossed the border. What made them risk their lives to move to an unknown country, where it was thought everything would be better?

It's just as relevant today as it was a decade ago, because it's written in simple, stripped-down storytelling language. It's an in-depth look at immigration and how people see it.

The voices of Marrakech – Elias Canetti

Strange and beautiful, this short story is a treat. When this Nobel Prize winner came to Marrakesh for a few weeks, his writing was filled to the brim with sharp observations, insightful thoughts, and meditations on "everyday" encounters.

A book of short stories I was sad to leave when I was done.

In Elias' writing, he has one of the most human, elegant, and unpretentious voices I've ever read. As you walk with him through the alleyways, streets and souks of Marrakesh, you'll see a great storyteller laying bare the city's and his own souls.

Naked lunch – William Burroughs

There are so many depraved phrases, paragraphs and characters and emotions in this book that I didn't want to put it on the list. When I came out of the book, I was shocked to see the sun shining.

Though the book was written while the author was living in Tangier, there isn't much of a storyline. It's more of an onslaught of experimental and shocking writing meant to show a sense of paranoia, aggression, disturbing sexuality of the pedophile variety, and decadent hard drug use, all of which have been seen in the city at one point or another.

You can still smell the stench of fear, urine, paranoia, and aggression in some parts of Tangier on the right or the wrong night.

The sheltering sky – Paul Bowles

Tense, clean, and beautiful writing.

In his book, Bowles talks about how he lived in Morocco for a large part of his life. His descriptions of the country's politics, culture, and way of life, especially when a Westerner is immersed in and confronted by the country's unfamiliarity, are interesting and insightful.

This is a story set in the late 1940s about a husband, wife, and one of their friends who go on an adventure that ends in disaster and failure.

If you want to know how Bowles' other stories go, you'll have to read them. They talk about the terrifying and exhilarating parts of traveling in a "wild" country without a safety net, and how it can make you lose your sanity and take you to places you never thought you'd see.

For bread alone – Mohamed Choukri

Classic. A haunting look at life in Tangier, Morocco, through the eyes of a very poor Moroccan family.

Told in simple, powerful words that describe truths with a force that stays with you. This book will show you some of the harsh realities of life in the Moroccan underclass, or in any country that has a lot of people who are poor.

A street in Marrakech – Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

Almost academic prose, a consuming attention to detail that slowly reveals great complexity, the kind of writing that books aren't written in any more.

They move into a house in the old medina, or old city, of Marrakech with their two young children in 1972.

What follows is a hyper-realistic and fascinating account of how a new person slowly adapts to living in the real world, with all of its social challenges, miscommunications, celebrations, stubbornness, and surprise.

This is a very interesting story, even more so because it gives us a glimpse into the lives of Moroccan women in a very short amount of time.

The spider’s house – Paul Bowles

In 1954, during Morocco's nationalist uprising, the book was set in Fez. It was published in 1955, and 1956 was the year that Morocco became independent from the French protectorate.

There are a lot of things that Bowles talks about here, but the story he tells in The Spider's House has a lot more prescience and relevance today, not to mention how it fits into a chain of events.

Moslem boy, American expat, and American tourist are all shown in this book. It's told from their perspectives.

It's a fight between different ideas in a city that is becoming more violent. Each character starts to think in a different way. Oddly, it looks like the conflict between the East and the West today.

Gravity according to birds – Leo Skala

It doesn't matter that I wrote it. I wrote this book based on my own experiences of arriving in Tanger, planning to stay for just one day with only $100 to my name, and then hitchhiking through the country and living there for years.

The sacred night – Tahar Ben Jelloun

The sequel to The Sand Child, which is a hallucinatory masterpiece of surreal and terrifying secrets, guilt, and powerful forms of shame. You meet Zahra, a young Moroccan woman who is learning about being a woman.

On the 27th Night of Ramadan, the Sacred Night, the Night of Destiny, Zahra's father died, just after he had for the first time acknowledged his daughter as a woman. She was born the eighth of eight daughters.

Doomed and strange fates, how they connect and what each person holds on to in order to get through it.

The caliph’s house – Tahir Shah

Tahir Shah decides to move his wife and three kids from London to an old, ruined, and haunted mansion on the outskirts of Casablanca. They will live there for a while. People live in Dar Kalifa, which is the home of the Caliph.

There are three Moroccan guardians who came to the house "in some kind of medieval transaction," and the house is being renovated. Shah, who was raised in England, is a Westerner with a rationalist mindset, but at the same time he is a descendant of the Prophet M.

It's very easy to read, but sometimes the writing isn't very good. It's still a great story that shows how two different cultures came together in a magical way.

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