KHALIL

After his suicide mission in Paris as part of the terrorist attacks of 2015 goes awry, a young Belgian named Kahlil suffers through dark nights of the soul back home.

On assignment from an Islamic State group affiliate, Khalil and a childhood friend were to have taken part in a massacre at the Stade de France. But while the friend blew himself up outside the French stadium, Khalil's vest failed to ignite, forcing him to return to his poor Brussels neighborhood, where neither his Moroccan-rooted family nor most of his friends know of his extremist bent. His emir, with whom he "grew up in the same gutter," acknowledges that Khalil was mistakenly given a defective suicide vest. But even after he's given another bombing mission, the increasingly paranoid Khalil is punished by the feeling that his cohorts think he lost his nerve the first time. Overcome by anger, guilt, and then grief over the shocking death of the only family member he cares about, he becomes physically ill. You wouldn't expect to care about a character whose life's purpose is to murder a large number of people. But Khalil, who tells his story with a mixture of punkish attitude and intellectual snobbery, is so utterly without meaningful human connection that it's hard not to feel a measure of sympathy. Khadra, an Algerian author based in France who writes under his wife's name (he adopted it while in the Algerian army to avoid military censorship), skillfully shows how someone like Khalil can be turned into a terrorist from a young age. With Khalil's fate—and those of countless potential victims—perpetually hanging in the balance, the book becomes a gripping existential inquiry that earns the author comparisons with Camus.

An exciting work of fiction rooted in docu-like reality.