Used book – Origins, Amin Maalouf

Once upon a time, there were two brothers, Gebrayel and Botros, born in late 19th-century Lebanon, still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. The first dreamt of conquering the world and left his native Orient to settle in Cuba. The second, a man of thought and books, remained in the country. Thus began the saga of the Maaloufs, sedentary or nomadic, swept away by history into a family diaspora, connected from Brazil to Australia and from the United States to France by the whisper of a name and the awareness of a common origin.

It is to this "tribe", whose history he reconstructs with the rigor of an archivist and the empathy of a novelist, that the author of Le Rocher de Tanios (Goncourt Prize 1993) pays a magnificent tribute of love and fidelity. For the writer, himself in exile, is it not his only homeland?

This book received the Prix Méditerranée 2004.