peter young’s listopia

78) Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, 2001
A teenage Jew, Momo, may be stealing from Monsieur Ibrahim's Paris shop but over time they form the kind of cross-cultural father-son relationship that both seem to have been seeking out. Ibrahim's Sufi beliefs come across as a light-hearted and positive way of dealing with the world, while Momo seems to find them more useful than Judaism and all but converts to Islam. It has echoes of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist but is far more engagingly written, and Schmitt's tale (the first in his four 'Cycle of the Unseen' books) has also been turned into a film which might be worth seeking out. An easily-digestible story well-served by good, fluid writing.