Youssef Boukachabine
Author. Köln, Germany.
This is the one address for my books. It stays the same when a book gets a new edition or a new shop, so it is the one printed inside them. Readers, publishers and anyone else can reach me at the email address at the bottom of this page.
Books
No Dust
Stop Grading Yourself
A book about the voice that narrates your life while you are living it, and grades it. It follows that voice through the oldest books we have, from the Buddha and Job to the Desert Fathers, Rumi and Pascal, and through one ordinary life, to the two-word reply a woodcutter who could not read gave to a verse on a monastery wall.
First edition, 2026, published by the author. English. Paperback and Kindle ebook.
The book's own site, with a free chapter
On Amazon from publication day
The Little Machine
A fable
In a town where everyone who is old enough carries a small machine that holds every answer ever written down, a girl is given hers on the morning she turns ten, and a week to write in the town's book what she will be. Everyone asks their machine. She asks hers. For the first time in its life, it doesn't know.
For everyone who was ever asked what they would be, and said "I don't know."
About 7,100 words, written to be illustrated. The text was finished in October 2026. A text-only first edition is coming; an illustrated edition will follow if there is money for an illustrator.
Forthcoming
More books will be listed here as they come out.
About
I live in Köln, Germany, with my family, and I write in the hours left over from the rest of life. Two books so far, and they are about the same thing from two sides.
No Dust came from an evening in front of a football match with the sound off. With the sound on, a commentator who had never touched the ball made me want one team to win; with the sound off, the wanting went. There was no button for the other commentator, the one in my own head, who had narrated and graded my life for as long as I could remember. For most of that life I had believed my thoughts the way I believed my own eyes, and felt I always had to be more and was never enough. I tried methods and teachings for years, and some of them helped. The book is what I found when I went looking for that voice in the oldest texts we have, and what a woodcutter who could not read said back to it.
The Little Machine came from the question every child is asked, what will you be, and from the one answer a child is not allowed to give. It is a fable about a town where everyone carries a machine that knows every answer ever written down, and about a girl who writes "I don't know" in the town's book anyway. It is written to be illustrated, though the first edition will be text only, and it was read aloud to children before it was finished, which is the review that counts.
What the two books share: something next to you that has an answer for everything, a voice in your head or a machine in your pocket, and the small things that stay yours regardless. The task in front of you. The right to not know yet.
I draft and revise with the help of an AI system and say so on the copyright page. Every draft is read first by family, friends and colleagues who have better things to do, and corrected as if it were theirs. Where the books are right, they are in them.
Contact
Write to y.boukachabine@gmx.de. I read everything and answer what needs an answer, usually within a few days. There is no form and no newsletter on this page; if you want to hear when a new book is out, say so in your email and I will send one message when it happens.
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