One-Way — Didier van Cauwelaert

Winner of the 1994 Prix Goncourt, shosen as one of the Best Books of 2003 by The Seattle Times.

One-Way recounts the comic, absurd, and all-too-believable adventures of Aziz Kemal, a young Frenchman raised as an Arab by Marseille gypsies. Arrested for a crime he did not commit, Aziz becomes the target of a government campaign to repatriate illegal immigrants and finds himself en route to Morocco, despite the fact that he is not Moroccan. Accompanying Aziz is a touchingly naïve and neurotic "humanitarian attaché" named Jean-Pierre Schneider, who drowns his own personal woes in his zeal to build a new life for his charge in a land neither one has ever seen.