The Spider's House

New York: Random House, 1955. Stated First Printing. 8vo. Black cloth covered boards stamped in blue, green and gold. 406 pp. A near fine, tight, clean copy with just a sprinkling of light foxing along fore-edge of text block./Lightly used dust jacket with brief wear at corners and tips.. The great medieval city of Fez is the fountainhead of native resistance to French rule in Morocco today. In this strange and disturbing place lives the boy, Amar, son of a Moslem holy man. Working for a potter, he gets into a fight with another youth and, while running away, finds himself in an orchard owned by Moulay Ali. There begins his personal entanglement in the violence which is about to erupt all over Morocco. Amar, almost instinctively, hates both the French and the Jews, yet there is not even the seed of "evil" in him. Still, he is cast into the snarled relations between people involved in a moral struggle set against a fiery background of political scheming and, ultimately, undeclared war. They are caught between the relentless French colonial secret police and the pitiless Istiqlal terrorists. Confused and resentful at their predicament, they move in an aura of intense suspicion and fear, even as the final rioting flames across the Medina.