3 ideas
The title comes from the Provençal word for galley rowers, taken up by Marseille's raggamuffin scene: in the chourmo you row together and are bound to others pulling the same oar. The book frames belonging through shared hardship and mutual involvement rather than origin, religion or ethnicity, as an open call to help one another.
Montale's cousin Gélou asks him to find her teenage son Guitou, who has run off to Marseille to be with Naïma, a girl of Algerian background. Guitou is killed in the house where Hocine Draoui, an Algerian historian who fled Islamist death threats, is also murdered by professional killers. A boy's adolescent romance across an ethnic line turns out to be tangled with political exile, Islamist violence and organized crime, and the family search becomes a map of the city's fault lines.
Montale is an ex-policeman who belongs partly to the immigrant quarters he grew up in and partly to the institutions that police them, and the novel views the city through that divided position. His ties across communities, including personal trust in the neighborhoods and help from some within the police, let him see both police indifference and complicity with the Mafia and the codes and loyalties of the quarters. Food, sea and friendship serve as the ground from which he judges both.