I Became You

Author: Ahlam Mosteghanemi

This is the novelized biography of the author in its luxurious edition. The cover here is hardcover, featuring a different image and design from the regular version of the book. This edition also contains many never-before-published photos, provided by the author from her family and personal archives. From photos of her father and mother, to her own pictures as a child, then a student, then a student at the Sorbonne University, to famous Algerian nationalists she met during her life and career.

The text itself is the same as published in both the regular and luxurious editions, in which the author, in an engaging narrative style, recounts excerpts from her biography and memoirs. Years of her blossoming and discovering innocent teenage love, her beginnings with poetry and her radio program that launched her in Algeria, her relationship with her father, the Algerian activist, and with her mother, and with the Arabic language, as she was among the first cohorts of Algerian youth who embraced it and graduated from its universities, her awareness of national issues in young Algeria, which achieved its independence, and the subsequent issues of independence euphoria. It is an enjoyable and heartwarming journey into the author's past, and a text loaded with family, social, and national details that start from the personal but apply to the community and historical period on a broader scale, written in the author's well-known impactful and poetic style, in addition to a sense of humor that makes reading even more enjoyable. It also reveals previously untold details, and contains a profound tribute to her father, who played the most important role in her upbringing and supporting her beginnings, as well as a sincere love letter to Algeria, and a rich discussion of the end of French colonialism and its political and social aftermath, which completes her work in the "Memory in the Flesh" trilogy.

An Algerian writer who achieved widespread success in the Arab world with her trilogy: "Memory in the Flesh" (1993), "Chaos of the Senses" (1997), "The Bed Hopper" (2003), and people received with the same enthusiasm her latest novel, "The Black Suits You" (2012), as well as "Nisyane.com" before (2009) and "You Are My Craving" (2015) and "Delicious as a Separation" (2019), as well as "Their Hearts Are With Us and Their Bombs Are Upon Us," which is Mosteghanemi's only political book. Forbes magazine classified her in 2006 as the most widely read Arab writer in the Arab world, with her book sales exceeding two million copies.