Maybe not the very freshest carrot – as in picked this morning at sunrise – but a fat and juicy one nevertheless for Alex Smith’s Algeria’s Way.
A while ago, Tonight reviewer Phil Murray sang the praises of this debut work, but our special Carrotstick™ radar didn’t pick it up until now.
Fortunately, carrots keep well in cold storage, so it’s not too late to let this one back into the daylight:
Algeria’s Way is an altogether surprising book. Upon reading the back cover and discovering that this is a novel about a girl, Algeria, who is “classified as honorary white under South Africa’s old laws”, the first surprise is that the story is set in Spain, and not in South Africa.
The second surprise is that it is a story about a pilgrimage, and one immediately imagines saints, sandals and sunburn. Again, the crafty backhand is that this novel is not about Catholicism or religious revelations. Rather, it is a sultry and simply told tale of exploration, truth and individuality.
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