Daniel Goetsch Ben Kader bilgerverlag, August 2006, 254 pp ISBN: 978-3-908010-81-4 The underlying theme of this thought-provoking novel is an important and highly topical one: the problem of alienation and the need among immigrants to establish a feeling of identity with the inhabitants of the country in which they live and work. Though set mainly in Switzerland, it starts in Algeria, back in the 1950s, when Ben Kader, a young specialist in oriental studies, is recruited by the French government to act as interpreter in a unit concerned with the interrogation of terrorist suspects. One night he is abducted by three members of the Algerian Liberation Front, two men and one woman, who accuse him of being involved with his colleagues in acts of torture. With difficulty he convinces them that he could not possibly be guilty of this, being himself an Arab (he is, in fact, of mixed Algerian and Armenian stock). They leave, he starts a love affair with the female member of the group, helps her to escape to France when things get too dangerous for her, then himself leaves the unit, the strain of his work having led him to near breakdown. So much for the background. Years later his son Dan, who is alienated from his father, is asked to collect a dossier which the old man, now seriously ill, wrote long ago and hand it to a French journalist. It contains, he belatedly finds, an account of Ben's time with the interrogation unit. Dan has a girlfriend, Miriam, who is making a documentary about the life of Isabelle Eberhardt, the Swiss writer, islamist and explorer. When the film is shown in Hamburg Ben is dead, and Dan goes along to the preview in his place. He has been sacked from his job with a Zurich PR firm on the grounds that he is arrogant, a loner, and in any case not Swiss, so is now himself a part of the estrangement syndrome, and he and Miriam have broken up. But they patch up their quarrel and as the book ends are walking together out of the arrivals terminal at Zurich airport. On the video screens they see a plane crashing into a New York skyscraper. It is 11 September 2001, and the paranoid conflict between alienation and identification is now even more for real.