Farida Belghoul

Who remembers that unlikely handful of marchers—campaigning "for equality and against racism"—who set out on the roads of France in October 1983 in obscurity, only to culminate in a triumphant finale in Paris, with nearly 100,000 people at the Bastille and the Élysée Palace as the finish line? "Put your guns away, we’re coming—hunting season is over," proclaimed the March, a response to the police violence and numerous racist crimes that had marked the early 1980s. A novel of the "Beur generation," Les Marcheurs revisits this little-known story.

Farida Belghoul, a teacher at a high school in the northern suburbs of Paris, has decided to withdraw her own children from the school system. Believing the system is in a state of total collapse, she wants to save her own children—as she puts it. Alternating between outrage and disillusionment, Farida fights a daily battle to keep her "closed-door" school alive.