Salvation Army / Abdellah Taïa

Abdellah Taïa was born in Morocco, a country that still considers homosexual acts illegal. For a brief year, he was the only openly gay man in Morocco and, though he has since left the country, he is still the only openly gay autobiographical writer published there. Salvation Army is Taïa's first published work translated into English, an "autobiographical novel" that straddles the line somewhere between fiction and memoir.

Plot
The novel focuses on three important milestones in the life of the narrator, not coincidentally named Abdellah: his youth, living with his family (eight siblings!) in a small house in a Moroccan village; his adolescence and the lovelust he felt for his older brother; and his early twenties, as a student in Switzerland. The plot here is non-traditional, even for an "autobiographical" novel. It is disjointed, and there is no real thread that links the various sections together, excepting the fact that they all make Abdellah into the man he becomes by the end of the novel.

Relevance
There's quite a lot here to titillate the GLBT audience. Taïa spends a lot of time talking about the feelings he has for his older brother, which effected his sexual awakening, and his relationship with an older man anchors much of the last section. This is another novel in which sex and sexuality are hugely important without ever becoming the abstract focus of the thing.