Leïla Slimani was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981 to a Moroccan banker father and a French-Algerian doctor mother. Raised in a Francophone household, she attended the French Lycée in Rabat before relocating to Paris in 1999. In Paris, she enrolled at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and later studied at the French Business School (Ecole supérieure de commerce de Paris).

Before her literary career, Slimani spent five years at the monthly news magazine Jeune Afrique, covering political and social issues. In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron appointed her as his personal representative for promoting the French language and culture within the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Slimani is married to a Parisian banker, with whom she has two children. Since 2021, the family has resided in Lisbon, Portugal.

Slimani has published five novels and several works of non-fiction. I’ll Take the Fire (J’emporterai le feu), published in French in 2025 and translated into English in 2026, is the third instalment in a historical fiction trilogy and multi-generational family saga inspired by her own family history. The narrative unfolds against the backdrop of political and social transformations in postwar Morocco. The trilogy traces the family’s story from 1944 to the early 2000s, spanning nearly six decades of Moroccan and global history.

The third novel (I’ll Take the Fire) centres on the family’s third generation, following Mia and her sister Inès (whose mother’s family name is Belhaj) from the 1980s to the 2000s. Raised in a sheltered, upper-class environment in Casablanca, both sisters eventually leave for Paris to pursue their studies. Mia begins a banking career in London, reflecting the ambitions she associated with her successful economist father, while Inès studies cardiology in Paris, following her mother’s footsteps.

Mehdi Daoud and Aïcha Belhaj, together with their two daughters, Mia and Inès, lead a Western-influenced lifestyle, which includes drinking alcohol, eating pork, not fasting during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, and celebrating Christmas. The daughters struggle to express themselves in Arabic and feel more comfortable speaking French. They are raised to resist traditional expectations and to embrace independence and freedom of thought.

After leaving her career in finance, Mia settles in Paris and begins writing. The death of her father is a profound turning point, propelling her toward literature and a deeper understanding of her family’s history. The story begins with Mia as a writer, then flashes back to recount her journey to that point.

The book opens with Mia’s monologue, set in 2021. The narrator, a writer, experiences depression after contracting Covid-19. To help her confront her fear of losing memories, a psychologist advises her to search for her “madeleine of Proust.” This guidance prompts her to explore her family’s past. The reference to Proust is particularly fitting because memory in the novel is not presented as a straightforward chronology. Instead, the past resurfaces through sensations, places, objects and stories, gradually revealing the connections between one generation and the next.

A significant symbolic moment in the novel, which also explains the book’s title, occurs when, before Mia leaves for Paris, Mehdi urges her to break free from the burden of her roots. The irony is that he encourages his daughter to do what he himself never managed to achieve: to break free by escaping the weight of the past. He hands her a copy of Milan Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere, a symbolic gift that reinforces his belief that her future lies beyond Morocco. He implores her to leave behind the ties that bind her to her roots, the house, possessions, and memories, to set a great fire and carry the fire with her. Then he tells her: “I am not saying goodbye, my darling; I am saying farewell”.

However, Mia ultimately does the opposite. She carries the fire of her family’s memories, losses, and aspirations, transforming them into literature. In this way, she fulfils her father’s dream, though not as he envisioned. The fire she carries is not one of destruction, but rather the fire of memory transformed into words.

The novel’s emotional force derives from recognising that freedom does not necessarily require severing connections with the past. Mia’s journey suggests that freedom may lie not in rejecting one’s inheritance, but in choosing how to engage with it: true freedom may lie in choosing how to engage with the inheritance one has received. While individuals cannot determine where their story begins, they can decide how to narrate it.

This tension between escape and belonging also shapes Mia and Inès’s lives. They belong to a generation with opportunities unavailable to earlier generations of their family: they can study abroad, pursue professional careers, and build lives outside Morocco. Their attempts to create independent identities are continually shaped by the world they came from.

The family’s three generations thus form a chain of inheritance. Each generation attempts to free itself from certain limitations imposed by the previous one, yet inevitably passes something on to the next. What is inherited is not only material wealth or social position, but also expectations, fears, aspirations and memories.

This third novel in Slimani’s trilogy adopts a more political focus than the previous two. It depicts life in Morocco under the authoritarian rule of King Hassan II. Citizens must speak discreetly and cautiously. A pervasive sense of anxiety characterises life under the regime. Mia and Inès’s father, Mehdi, who manages a state bank, is imprisoned without charges for refusing to submit to political pressures.

The novel’s political dimension is important to the story. Slimani does not present this history as something separate from the family’s private life. State repression enters the home and undermines the family’s sense of security, while the country’s shifting social and political circumstances shape the choices available to each generation. Mehdi’s imprisonment shows that even privilege and social position cannot fully shield individuals from political authority.

Memory therefore becomes more than a literary device; it becomes a way for Mia to understand her inheritance, which encompasses not only wealth, education, and social position, but also trauma, ambition, fear, longing, and unresolved questions. This may be the deeper meaning of the fire in the title. Leaving everything behind is impossible; instead, distance provides the perspective necessary to return to that past and examine it. Even when individuals believe they have escaped their origins, they continue to carry aspects of them.

I’ll Take the Fire is not only a family saga but also a novel about inheritance: what we receive from previous generations, what we reject, and what we choose to preserve. Slimani’s characters live at the intersection of Morocco and Europe, tradition and modernity, memory and erasure. Their attempts to escape one world often lead them to discover how deeply that world has shaped them.

The novel brings the personal and the historical together. The Belhaj family’s story unfolds alongside Morocco’s political and social transformation, showing how national history becomes part of individual and family memory. Mia’s journey from Morocco to Europe, from banking to literature, and from distancing herself from her past to confronting it, gives the trilogy a fitting sense of culmination.

What begins as an attempt to recover lost memories becomes an act of reclaiming an inheritance. Mia cannot change the history she has inherited, but she can decide what to do with it. By turning her family’s memories into literature, she neither abandons the past nor remains imprisoned by it.

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Michael Finkel, born in 1969 in the United States, is an American journalist and non-fiction author. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he began his journalistic career in the early 1990s, contributing to National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, and other publications before becoming a full-time author. He currently resides with his family in northern Utah, where he continues to produce journalism and non-fiction books that examine the complexities of human behaviour, obsession, crime, and the search for identity.

The Art Thief, published in 2023, is a non-fiction story about the French art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, born in 1971 in Mulhouse, France. Between 1995 and 2001, he carried out hundreds of thefts from museums, cathedrals, art galleries, and auction houses across Europe.

Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser did not steal for financial gain. Instead, he stole works of art because he wanted to own and admire them. By the time he was caught after attempting to steal a hunting horn from a museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, he had stolen works of art worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In March 2023, a French court convicted him of additional thefts he carried out between 2014 and 2019. He committed all his thefts during the day, without resorting to violence, and with great caution.

The Art Thief combines detailed reporting and brief psychological analysis, through extensive research and interviews, to examine an unusual real-life phenomenon. Rather than focusing exclusively on the value of the stolen artworks, Finkel questions the motivations that drive individuals to risk everything for the sake of art, and how obsession can blur the boundary between admiration and criminality.

The book delves into the paradox in which a profound love of art leads to a desire for possession that supersedes respect for legal or ethical constraints, raising thought-provoking questions about compulsion, identity, and the human desire for beauty.

Finkel suggests that Breitwieser’s obsession with collecting may have stemmed from his troubled relationship with his father, whose departure after his parents’ divorce had a significant emotional impact. Consequently, Breitwieser’s persistent acquisition of artworks can be interpreted as an attempt to surpass his father as a collector and to compensate for feelings of abandonment.

Breitwieser lived in his mother’s house, where he kept hundreds of stolen artworks hidden in his attic rooms, unbeknownst to her. He lived there with his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, who helped by keeping watch while he carried out the thefts, creating a private gallery they could both admire whenever they wished.

Finkel’s writing style throughout the book reveals his journalistic background. It reads like engrossing narrative journalism, combining reporting with storytelling techniques to create a book with the suspense of a crime novel.

Despite its strengths, certain sections of the book are repetitive. Finkel presents detailed accounts of numerous thefts, but their similar execution makes some chapters predictable and disrupts the narrative flow.

For example, multiple scenes describe how Breitwieser and his girlfriend would enter a small museum, quickly assess the security, and then discreetly remove an artwork while she acted as lookout. The repeated descriptions of this process, such as the theft of the ivory sculpture from a German museum, which closely mirrors earlier heists, sometimes make it difficult to distinguish one incident from another.

Although Finkel touches on Breitwieser’s childhood, his relationship with his father, and his obsession with collecting art, the author could have offered a more in-depth psychological analysis of the factors that shaped his character and behaviour. A deeper focus on his internal motivations would strengthen the book’s impact and give readers a more complete understanding of his actions.

This consideration raises a broader question: To what extent can we understand the motivations of individuals like Breitwieser, and are there inherent limits to comprehending the psychological origins of obsessive or criminal behaviour?