There are novels that become famous because they predict the future. Tahar Djaout's The Last Summer of Reason is more unsettling because it was written while the future was already arriving.

Djaout was an Algerian journalist, poet and novelist who was assassinated in 1993 by Islamist extremists during Algeria's civil conflict. This novel, published posthumously, imagines a society in which books, imagination and independent thought have become suspect. At its centre is Boualem Yekker, a bookseller trying to preserve an interior life in a world increasingly organised around certainty, obedience and ideological purity.

The novel is often compared to Orwell and Bradbury, but it feels stranger and more intimate than either. Rather than focusing on the machinery of totalitarianism, Djaout explores what happens to private consciousness when imagination itself becomes dangerous. Deep within is the seduction of certainty; the desire to exchange ambiguity, doubt and complexity for the comfort of absolute answers. More than thirty years later, it reads with unnerving relevance.

Translated from the French by Marjolijn de Jager, with a foreword by Wole Soyinka and an introduction by Alek Baylee Toumi.

Paperback, University of Nebraska Press (Bison Books), first Nebraska paperback printing, 2007. Very good condition with light shelf wear and a clean, unmarked interior.