The Last Friend

Tangiers, the late 1950s. Two teenagers, Mamed and Ali, strike up an intense friendship that will last a lifetime. But lurking just beneath the surface is a deep, unspoken jealousy in danger of destroying them both.
Decades later, the two friends, wiser and world-weary, offer differing accounts of their relationship's twists and turns, from their rebellious youth spent subverting the rigid moral strictures of the day to harrowing months spent together as political prisoners, and their eventual settling into conventional family lives. Only then do the real differences between them emerge, culminating in an unimaginable and unforgettable act of betrayal.
The Last Friend is both a coming-of-age story and a portrait of Morocco in an era of repression and disillusionment. Ben Jelloun captures the complexities and contradictions of a lifelong friendship and a singular threat to its existence.