020 7388 1840, 
maghrebbookshop.com), which supplies current, out-of-print and rare books on all aspects of North Africa, and will ship worldwide.There is a wealth of books about Morocco, set in Morocco, or by Moroccans, and you won’t regret having one or two along on a trip. The main online bookshops are likely to yield the highest returns on the more esoteric recommendations below. Otherwise, you might want to try the UK-based Maghreb Bookshop, 45 Burton St, London WC1 (020 7388 1840, maghrebbookshop.com), which supplies current, out-of-print and rare books on all aspects of North Africa, and will ship worldwide.
Margaret and Robin Bidwell Morocco: the Traveller’s Companion. The name’s a bit misleading: this isn’t so much a traveller’s companion as a compendium of titbits from travellers of the past, mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but including everyone from Samuel Pepys and Leo Africanus to Mark Twain and George Orwell, giving their impressions of the people, the land, government and local customs. There are even a few Moroccan recipes.
Paul Bowles Points in Time, Their Heads Are Green. Novelist, poet and composer Paul Bowles (1910–99) lived in Tangier for half a century and, more or less single-handedly, brought translations of local writers to Western attention. These two books of his own are superb. Points is a series of tales and short pieces inspired by episodes and sources from earliest times to the present day. Heads includes a couple of travel essays on Morocco and a terrific piece on the psychology of desert travel.
Hamish Brown The Mountains Look On Marrakech: A Trek Along the Atlas Mountains. Hamish Brown has been to Morocco every year since 1965 to visit his beloved Atlas mountains, and his love for the country, its people, its landscapes and its wildlife shines through in this inspirational account of a nine-hundred-mile trek right across the High Atlas range.
Hamish Brown The High Atlas: Treks and Climbs on Morocco’s Biggest and Best Mountains. The best and most important trekking guide to the High Atlas mountains, where to go and how to get there. This is as much about the people as the landscapes, and is as insightful as it’s practical.
Elias Canetti The Voices of Marrakesh. A small, compelling volume of impressions of Marrakesh in the last years of French rule, by the Nobel Prize-winning author. The atmosphere of many pieces still holds.
Walter Harris Morocco That Was. Harris, Times correspondent in Tangier from the 1890s until his death in 1933, saw the country at probably the strangest ever stage in its history – the last years of “Old Morocco” in its feudal isolation and the first of French occupation. Morocco That Was, first published in 1921, is a masterpiece – alternately sharp, melodramatic and very funny. It incorporates, to some extent, the anecdotes in his earlier Land of an African Sultan (1889) and Tafilet (1895, o/p).
Orin Hargraves Culture Shock! Morocco. Hargraves worked in Morocco in the 1980s as a Peace Corps volunteer and this valuable paperback, revised in 2007, is a distillation of his experience, supported by an impressive range of research and, clearly, a lot of conversations throughout the country. He offers perceptive accounts of almost every aspect of contemporary Moroccan life, along with a good overview of history and religion, and an instructive section of dos and don’ts.
John Hopkins The Tangier Diaries. Highly entertaining journals of Tangier life – and travels across Morocco – from an American novelist, resident in Tangier during the 1960s and 1970s. Paul and Jane Bowles and William Burroughs all figure large in the diary entries.
Peter Mayne A Year in Marrakesh. Mayne went to Marrakesh in the early 1950s, found a house in an ordinary district of the Medina, and tried to live like a Moroccan. He couldn’t, but wrote an unusually perceptive account explaining why.
Budgett Meakin The Land of the Moors, The Moors: A Comprehensive Description (1902). Out of print but available online (archive.org/details/landofmoorscompr00meak), these wonderful encyclopedic volumes were the first really detailed books on Morocco and Moroccan life.
Barnaby Rogerson (ed.) Marrakech Through Writers’ Eyes. A feast of an anthology, ranging from the earliest accounts, through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers and envoys, to contemporary writers such as Esther Freud and Juan Goytisolo.
Tahir Shah The Caliph’s House. This is a terrific read: a funny, eccentric and insightful look at Casablanca, and Morocco as a whole, through the narrative of buying and restoring a house in the city.
Josh Shoemake Tangier: a Literary Guide for Travellers. An exploration of Tangier as seen through the eyes of foreign writers – everyone from Samuel Pepys to William Burroughs and Mark Twain to Patricia Highsmith – well written and a great companion when you're there.
Jeffrey Tayler Valley of the Casbahs. Tayler set out, in 2001, on a journey to trace the Drâa Valley from source to sea, on foot and by camel. His chief objective was to try to meet and understand the “Ruhhal” – the remaining desert nomads. The journey – one of the most compelling of modern accounts – left him by turns appalled and inspired.
J.M. Abun-Nasr History of the Maghreb in the Islamic Period. Morocco in the wider context of North Africa by a distinguished Arab historian.
Marvine Howe Morocco: The Islamist Awakening and Other Challenges. A former New York Times correspondent who had known the country since the 1950s, returns to live there in 1999. Her return coincides with the new king, Mohammed VI, and the rise of Islamic radicalism in the Arab world. She takes the story through to 2005.
Gavin Maxwell Lords of the Atlas. Drawing heavily on Walter Harris’s accounts of the Moorish court (see opposite), this is the story of the Glaoui family – literally the “Lords” of the High Atlas, where they exercised almost complete control from the turn of the nineteenth century right through to Moroccan independence in 1956. Not an attractive tale but a compelling one, and superbly told. Originally published in 1966, it was republished in a superbly illustrated edition in 2000.
C.R. Pennell Morocco from Empire to Independence. This is the first general history of modern Morocco. It covers the major strands of power but also the social and cultural life of ordinary Moroccans and is strong on the country’s pressing contemporary concerns of poverty, drought and worsening agricultural land.
Douglas Porch The Conquest of Morocco. Accessible and fascinating account of the extraordinary manoeuvrings and characters in Morocco at the turn of the twentieth century.
Susan Raven Rome in Africa. A well-illustrated survey of Roman (and Carthaginian) North Africa.
Barnaby Rogerson A Traveller’s History of North Africa. A good, up-to-date, general history, authoritative but very readable, covering not just Morocco, but also Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, which Rogerson sees as a kind of island, isolated by sea and desert, and thus set apart from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.
David Woolman Rebels in the Rif. An academic but fascinating study of the Riffian war in the 1920s and of the tribes’ uprising against the Moroccan government in 1956, unfortunately no longer in print.
Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress The Berbers. An overview of the Berber peoples of Morocco, Algeria and beyond, ranging through anthropology, history and literature.
Elizabeth Fernea A Street in Marrakech. A nicely written account of a woman anthropologist’s study of and experiences in Marrakesh in the 1980s.
David Hart Tribe and Society in Rural Morocco. A collection of essays, dating from 1985 to 2000, around the themes of tribalism and Berber identity in Morocco. More accessible than it sounds, with titles such as Scratch a Moroccan, Find a Berber.
Fatima Mernissi Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women. Eleven women – carpet weavers, rural and factory workers, teachers – talk about all aspects of their lives, from work and housing to marriage. A fascinating insight into a normally very private world.
The Koran (translated by Arthur J. Arberry, Oxford University Press; translated by J.M Rodwell, o/p but online at gutenberg.org/etext/2800). The word of God as proclaimed by Mohammed is notoriously untranslatable. Arberry’s version attempts to preserve its poetic beauty and retains the traditional arrangement of suras (according to their length). Rodwell’s 1861 translation is a little dated, but provides analytical footnotes, and was originally arranged, as far as possible, in the order in which the suras were composed, making it easier to follow the development of ideas; unfortunately most modern editions of Rodwell’s translation revert to the traditional order.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr Ideals and Realities of Islam. A good general introduction to the Islamic faith by an Iranian-born American academic, told from the point of view of a believer explaining his faith for the benefit of non-Muslim Westerners.
James F. Jereb Arts and Crafts of Morocco. A fine introduction, with over 150 colour photographs.
Lisa Lovatt-Smith Moroccan Interiors. A coffee-table tome aimed at the interior design market, but goes beyond that in its coverage of traditional crafts, and traditional and modern architecture, with lots of gorgeous colour photographs.
Brooke Pickering et al Moroccan Carpets. Edited by a New York collector and dealer, this is the best book on Moroccan carpets – a large format, fully illustrated guide, showing examples region by region.
Herbert Ypma Morocco Modern. A superbly illustrated book that traces the origins of the great artisan traditions of Morocco (weavers, woodworkers, potters, zellij-makers) and looks at the way contemporary designers and architects reinterpret these influences to create surprisingly modern work.
Paula Wolfert The Food of Morocco. This is rather lavishly illustrated for a cookbook, but its rich mix of recipes, photographs and general discussion on the basics, principles and defining ingredients of Moroccan cooking, make it an excellent all-round primer. Wolfert’s earlier and simpler Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, originally published in 1973, was the first Moroccan cookbook available in English, and remains among the best, with an emphasis on ordinary, rural cooking.
By far the largest (and finest) body of Moroccan fiction published in English are the translations by the American writer Paul Bowles, who lived in Tangier from the 1940s until his death in 1999, and also translated the first part of Mohammed Choukri’s autobiography (see below). The short stories share a common fixation with intrigue and unexpected narrative twists, and are often punctuated by episodes of violence. None have particular characterization, though this hardly seems relevant as they have such a strong, vigorous narrative style – brilliantly matched by Bowles’ sharp, economic language.
Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi A Life Full of Holes. Bowles’ first Moroccan translation – in 1964 – a direct narrative of street life in Tangier. It was published under a pseudonym, the author being Larbi Layachi who, two decades later, published Yesterday and Today, a kind of sequel, describing in semi-fictionalized (and not very sympathetic) form his time with Paul and Jane Bowles.
Mohammed Mrabet Love with a Few Hairs; The Boy Who Set the Fire & Other Stories; The Lemon; M’Hashish; The Chest; Marriage With Papers; The Big Mirror; Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins; The Beach Café and The Voice; Look and Move On: An Autobiography. Mohammed Mrabet’s stories – The Beach Café is perhaps his best – are often kif-inspired, which gives them a slightly paranoid quality, as Mrabet himself explained: “Give me twenty or thirty pipes…and an empty room can fill up with wonderful things, or terrible things. And the stories come from these things.”
Abdelkader Benali Wedding by the Sea. Moroccan magical realism, and an impressive debut novel by a Moroccan-born author living in the Netherlands since childhood. The story is about a young man who returns (from Holland) to his seaside village in Morocco for his sister’s wedding, and during the festivities finds the bridegroom has made off to the local brothel. Sweet revenge lies in store from his sister.
Tahar Ben Jelloun The Sand Child and Corruption. The best of around a dozen books by Ben Jelloun that have been translated into English. The Sand Child, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is the tale of a girl brought up in southern Morocco as a boy in order to thwart Morocco’s inheritance laws. Corruption, as its title suggests, explores the endemic corruption in contemporary Morocco, through the story of Mourad, the last honest man in the country, who attempts to stay clear of brown envelopes in Casablanca and Tangier.
Mahi Binebine Welcome to Paradise. Binebine grew up in Morocco, lived in America and has now settled in France. This is his first book to be published in English and it is utterly engaging: a tale of life in the poorest areas of contemporary Morocco and the motivations that drive people to hand over all their savings to a trafficker to cross the Straits of Gibraltar and take their chances as illegals in Europe. Superbly translated and hugely evocative.
Mohamed Choukri For Bread Alone and Streetwise. Choukri’s two-part autobiography (the first volume translated by Paul Bowles, the second by Ed Emery) ranks among the best works of contemporary Arabic literature. Born in the Rif, he moved with his family to Tangier at a time of great famine, spending his childhood in abject poverty. During his adolescence he worked for a time for a French family. He then returned to Tangier, where he experienced the violence of the 1952 independence riots. Throughout his adversities, two things shine through: Choukri’s determination to use literacy to surmount his desperate circumstances; and his compassion for the normally despised human beings who share this life of “the lowest of the low”.
Driss Chraibi Heirs to the Past. A benchmark novel, which takes the crisis of Moroccans’ post-colonial identity as its theme. It is semi-autobiographical as the author-narrator (who has lived in France since the war) returns to Morocco for the funeral of his father. A number of other Chraibi novels are also available in translation.
Richard Hamilton The Last Storytellers. A selection of typically bittersweet tales from what may well be the last generation of traditional storytellers in Marrakesh’s Jemaa el Fna, collected, translated and introduced by a sometime BBC Morocco correspondent keen to preserve some remnant of this great Arabic – and in particular Moroccan – tradition.
Fatima Mernissi Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. Part fairy tale, part feminist manifesto, a mix of biographical narrative, stories and fantasies by a renowned Moroccan sociologist (author of Doing Daily Battle;), who was born in a Fez harem in 1940.
Brick Ousaïd Mountains Forgotten by God. Autobiographical narrative of an Atlas Berber family, which gives an impressive sense of the harshness of mountain life. As the author describes it, it is “not an exercise in literary style [but] a cry from the bottom of my heart, of despair and revolt”.
Foreign fiction & Biography set in Morocco
Once again, Paul Bowles is the outstanding figure in American and European fiction set in Morocco.
NOVELS: The Sheltering Sky; Let It Come Down; The Spider’s House. STORIES: Collected Stories of Paul Bowles 1939–76; Collected Stories; Midnight Mass; Unwelcome Words. Collected Stories of Paul Bowles 1939–76 gathers together work from numerous editions, as does the more selective Collected Stories. Post-1976 collections include Midnight Mass and Unwelcome Words. Bowles is the most interesting and the most prolific foreign writer using North African themes, and many of his stories are similar in vein to those of Mohammed Mrabet (see opposite), employing the same sparse forms, bizarre twists and interjections of violence. The novels are different, exploring both Morocco and how Westerners react to it. If you read nothing else on the country, at least try The Spider’s House – one of the best political novels ever written, its backdrop the traditional daily life of Fez, its theme the conflicts and transformation at the last stages of the French occupation of Morocco.
BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS: The best of the biographies and memoirs of Bowles and his literary friends and acquaintances in Tangier are:
Michelle Green The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades of Tangier. A strong narrative, compulsively peopled: the best read if you’re looking for one book on Tangier literary life.
Paul Bowles Without Stopping. Bowles’ autobiography is of interest for its Moroccan episodes (though William Burroughs wryly dubbed it “Without Telling”), as is his Two Years Beside the Strait (published in US as Days: A Tangier Journal, 1987–89).
William Burroughs Naked Lunch. This iconic Beat novel written in a Tangier hotel room (Villa Muniria) in 1954–57 consists of a series of nightmarish sex-and-drugs-obsessed tableaux. It isn’t especially about Morocco, but Tangier features as the “Interzone”, and is undoubtedly the place to read it.
Rafael Chirbes Mimoun. Compelling tale of a Spanish teacher, based south of Fez, adrift amid sexual adventures and bizarre local life and antagonisms.
Esther Freud Hideous Kinky. An English hippy takes her two daughters to Marrakesh, where they live simply, as locals. The narrative – funny, sad, and full of informed insights – is narrated by the 5-year-old.
John Haylock Body of Contention. An enjoyable romp set amid the expat community of Tangier in the months following independence in 1957.
John Hopkins All I Wanted Was Company. A gossipy tale about an American in Tangier and his lovers, one of whom disappears to the Sahara. The author’s Tangier Diaries document his time as an expat in Morocco’s edgiest city.
Jane Kramer Honor to the Bride. A fictional narrative based on a true story about a bride-to-be who is kidnapped, and her family’s desperate struggle to get her respectably married off after such a disgrace.
Umberto Pasti Age of Flowers. An Italian novel set in Tangier at the end of the 1990s, with a decadent scene of writers and artists counterpoised by the growing influence of Islamists in the streets.