Product Description

This true story tells of the hardship endured by a Moroccan family incarcerated for 20 years by King Hassan II of Morocco, punished for a crime perpetrated by their father.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #857152 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-06
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
La Prisonniere topped the French bestseller lists for many weeks, selling well over 100,000 copies, but one's initial reaction is that something must have got lost in the translation. The style is dour, to say the least, and the opening chapters contain a catalogue of unnecessary family information that may have the reader nodding off. Curiously, though, as the pace of the action heats up, the deadness of the prose comes into its own. This is not a story that needs to be oversold and reads all the better for its minimalist delivery. The bare bones of the book are classic derring-do adventure, and Hollywood almost certainly has its eyes on the film rights--complete with American cast.

Malika Oufkir was born into a well-connected Moroccan family and when she was five years old she was chosen to be the special companion of Lalla Mina, King Muhammad V's daughter. Malika was taken away from her family and remained confined within the palace at Rabat for 14 years. She then had two years of vague normality before her father, General Oufkir, was implicated in an assassination attempt on Muhammad's successor, King Hassan II. The General was executed and Malika and the rest of her family were slung into a remote desert gaol where they remained for 15 years. Their release was only secured after they tunnelled their way out of the prison and remained at liberty for five days; the resulting furore after their recapture led to the family being transferred to house arrest and it was not until 1996 that the they were able to leave the country.

If the action drives the narrative, it is the clashes between Middle-Eastern and Western culture that are the most telling. Even in the 1960s it was de rigueur for the King to have a harem full of concubines and throughout one senses the tension between the materialistic, hedonistic indulgence of the ruling elite and their conformity to Muslim culture. Throughout La Prisonniere, Oufkir is a keen observer of her own injustices, but is rather slower on the uptake when it comes to the wider injustices of a despotic regime. --John Crace

From the Back Cover
Malika Oufkir has been a prisoner for virtually her whole life. Born into a proud Berber family in 1953, the eldest daughter of the King of Morocco's closest aide, Malika was adopted by Mohammed V as a royal ward and brought to live in the palace at Rabat to be a companion to his favourite little daughter. There she grew up locked away among the royal wives and concubines of the King's harem. After the old king died his successor Hassan II took over the role of her affectionate adoptive father. By the time she was allowed to leave the palace at the age of sixteen, she was one of the most eligible heiresses in the kingdom, and tasted a couple of years of heady freedom amongst the international jetset.

But in 1972, when Malika was eighteen, her father, General Oufkir, was arrested after an attempt to assassinate the king, and summarily executed. Malika, her beautiful mother and her five brothers and sisters - the youngest of whom was barely three years old - were thrown into a remote desert jail by the man Malika had only known as a loving surrogate father. The family was kept locked away without any communication with the outside world in increasingly barbaric and inhumane conditions, fighting a daily battle against malnutrition, disease, loneliness and despair. Then, after fifteen years of imprisonment, the last ten years of which they were locked up in solitary cells, the Oufkir children managed an audacious escape. Recaptured after five days, the public hue and cry created by their escape ensured that they were then submitted to house arrest rather than prison - but it was only in 1996, after her younger sister managed to flee the country, that Malika, robbed of the best years of her life, was allowed to leave Morocco and start a new life in France.

About the Author
Malika Oufkir
Now 46 years old, Malika Oufkir lives in Paris with her French architect husband. Michele Fitoussi is of Tunisian descent, and is the author of several novels as well as the literary editor of French Elle.

Customer Reviews

fantastic, gripping, made me late into bed and to work
This book grips you from the first line. The magnitude of her rich upringing grips you as a story in its own situation, something we all yearn for. Yet this makes the fall from grace a longer drop. She tells the story of her suffering with a painfull and real truth, that will hit a chord with everyone.

A WONDERFUL BOOK-EXPERIENCE
I want say what I think about the incredible story of the oufkir family. I was very shocked by the sofference and all the other privations that this innocent family proved. I think that in the first part of the book, where there's an introduction of the childhood of Malika is less intresting respect to the second part where the author said about the prisony; but I also think that the first part is very important because allow to the reader to know the difference from a life of joy and freedom and a life of privations and inhuman sofference. Finally i said that this is a great exciting book and for me was a good reading experience. I council this book to everyone to know what there is in the hidden face of the humankind.

AN INTRUIGING BOOK...
La Prisonniere, by Malika Oufkir was a heart warming, emotional story that reduced me to tears on a number of occasions, knowing that I myself, would have never of survived the horrendous, 20 year torture Malika and her family recieved. After reading this excellent masterpiece, I feel as though I should write a letter to the Oufkir family, to congratulate them of their release, and their constant will to survive and escape. I am thirteen years old, and I never knew such terrible conditions were going on just 6 years ago. I am so pleased Amnesty International has released thousands of other political or innocent prisoners like Malika from disgusting, inhumane conditions.