Tomboy

Nina Bouraoui was born in Rennes, France, to an Algerian father and a French mother. Shortly thereafter, she moved with her family to Algiers, where she lived until the age of thirteen. Bouraoui received the literary prize Prix du Livre Inter in 1991 and the Prix Renaudot in 2005. Marjorie Attignol Salvodon is an assistant professor of French at Suffolk University. Jehanne-Marie Gavarini is an associate professor of art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and a visiting scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.

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"Bouraoui's quiet and inwardly focused coming-of-age novel delves deeply into intimate questions of self-definition—and ultimately the urge to become a writer."—Publishers Weekly "Reminiscent of Marguerite Duras' The Lover, Bouraoui's phrasing and pace are bold and naïve at the same time, much like a teenage girl. . . . Translators Marjorie Attignol Salvodon and Jehanne-Marie Gavarini have done a superb job of making Nina's voice ring authentically high and low, shrill and profound. A beautiful and moving book, Tomboy is entirely worthy of its comparison to Duras."—ForeWord Praise for the original French Garçon manqué: "Painful, enlightening, fascinating, impossible, yet very real. . . . It is these visceral feelings experienced by almost everyone of double nationality that Nina Bouraoui so masterfully expresses through her highly sensual and incantatory writing. In the beginning of a twenty-first-century world of demographic upheaval, exile, and thousands of children born of mixed race, many can relate to Bouraoui's struggles; thus the universal appeal of Garçon manqué in spite of its French-Algerian context."—Melissa Marcus, World Literature Today "Nina Bouraoui is by all accounts one of the most compelling of today's young French writers. The publication of her best-known work, Tomboy, is timely, as are its themes of French-Algerian biculturalism and trans-gender identity. Salvodon and Gavarini have rendered Bouraoui's intense, hypnotic and breathless style with admirable skill."—Isabelle de Courtivron, professor of French studies and director of the Center for Bilingual/Bicultural Studies at MIT "Tomboy is a welcome first translation of Bouraoui's work. . . . The translators have made a fine novel fully accessible to readers of English."—Brian Thompson, Women in French Studies