A Certain Woman
by El Badry, Hala
In this prize-winning novel, Nahid is a woman determined to go on a journey of self discovery and understanding. As we accompany her in her sometimes delirious, sometimes lucid journey, we are given rare glimpses of the inner thoughts and feelings of a woman confronting questions of love and intimacy within and outside of marriage. It is a story of one woman’s quest for liberation, not from a repressive society or a male-dominated world-but from self-imposed taboos that inhibit a woman’s ability to find fulfillment and to confront the many imponderables surrounding sexuality, desire, and love.
Review
“A Certain Woman contributes to the growing body of imaginative literature written by Arab women and translated into English. The translation of this novel is alliterative, poetic, and strikingly vivid.” – Al Jadid
About the Author
Born in Cairo in 1954, Hala El Badry graduated from Cairo University and is now deputy editor-in-chief of Egypt’s radio and television magazine. A Certain Woman, her fourth novel, was awarded the prize for best novel of 2001 at the Cairo International Book Fair. Farouk Abdel Wahab, the Ibn Rushd Professorial Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Chicago, has translated numerous Arabic works of fiction, most recently Love in Exile by Bahaa Taher and No One Sleeps in Alexandria by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, both published by the AUC Press.