Khalil A novel

Khalil fully expected his suicide vest to go off at the 2015 Stade de France terrorist attacks in Paris. Instead, he watches from the sidelines as his fellow jihadis execute the assignment he was to be a part of. As he tries to find answers about his unfulfilled mission, Khalil offers a peek into his hardscrabble upbringing in the poor Belgian suburban neighborhood of Molenbeek. "You don't know how they came down on you or when it started: an argument that degenerated, a racist remark, a feeling of impotence in the face of injustice--it's hard to pinpoint the moment when the rejection of an entire society starts to germinate inside you," Khalil says. He recounts stories about his Moroccan immigrant family, childhood friendships, and the reason for his gradual turn to radicalism. The characters sometimes feel like mere vehicles for Khadra's (The Dictator's Last Night, 2015) messaging about disaffected youth. Nevertheless, the novel does illuminate Khalil's travails with plenty of empathy. As a result, his misguided motivations define a believable if not entirely relatable figure.

Algerian writer Khadra (What the Day Owes the Night) chronicles a young man's involvement in terrorism, beginning with an account of the November 2015 Paris attacks. Narrator Khalil, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, follows his childhood friend Driss into a Muslim fundamentalist group known as the Fraternal Solidarity Association. Together they are assigned to be part of a group of suicide bombers who will target the Stade de France in Paris during a soccer game, bent on transforming the event into one of "global mourning." By weaving real events into Khalil's story, With a narrative both intimate and broad, Khadra attempts to show the ways the disenfranchised and marginalized are seduced into violent fundamentalism, but much of this comes off as sketchy sociology. When Khalil's suicide vest fails to detonate, he goes into hiding and relies on friends and family to shield him from his co-conspirators while lying to them about his involvement in the bombings. After he finally reconnects with the "brotherhood," Khalil must decide where his loyalties lie: with those he loves or with his mission with the terrorists. The narrator functions as a cipher for a series of conversations about Muslim identity and racism in relation to the stigma of Islamic terrorism, which are by turns illuminating and pedantic. In the end, Khadra's difficult story about one man's search for meaning comes up short. (Feb.)

Author of The Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, both short-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Khadra here introduces us to Belgian Moroccan Khalil, whose suicide vest fails to detonate as he stands outside the Stade de France in November 2015. He shimmies into the crowd and remains mum and glum about his failure, then learns that his ISIS affiliate had other plans for him all along. A French best seller.

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.