The Red Nightingale

From a Berber woman banished to North Africa, expunged from her common-law marriage with St. Augustine at the behest of his mother, Monica, descends a line of cave dreamers whose dreams transport us out of the past to 1970s Algiers and a young Berber woman named Malena, who flees her tribe to avoid a forced marriage. Malena longs to be a jazz singer in Paris but ends up in a sleazy cabaret in terror-ridden Algiers. In her subsequent struggle to earn enough money to pay her way out, she scrubs, sings, acts as a go-between for her CIA-operative boss, and runs poor workers through an underground conduit to Spain. Malena's exploits soon gain the attention of Algerian Security. When she is implicated in a French plot to reclaim Algerian oil for nonpayment of royalties, her life is in jeopardy. She meets and falls in love with another CIA operative, Lytton Mallory, who vows to help her escape. She nearly realizes her escape to Paris, when Algerian Security closes in. Malena must find another way out.