In collaboration with Saqi Books, we’ve put together a list of books we think you’ll love to read this summer. Don’t forget, there are plenty of other books to borrow from our extensive library. Email us to book an appointment to pop in and explore and, for an insight into what’s available, you can search our website catalogue by author or title.
River Spirit
This spellbinding new novel from Leila Aboulela tells the unforgettable story of an embattled young woman’s coming of age during the revolutionary war in nineteenth-century Sudan.
When Akuany and her brother are orphaned in a village raid, they are taken in by Yaseen, a young merchant. Yaseen’s vow to care for them will tether him to Akuany throughout their lives. As revolution begins to brew, led by the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Sudan begins to prise itself from Ottoman rule, and everyone must choose a side.
Yaseen feels beholden to stand against this false Mahdi, a decision that threatens to splinter his family. Meanwhile, Akuany moves through her young adulthood and across the country alone, sold and traded from house to house, with only Yaseen as her intermittent lifeline. Their struggle will mirror the increasingly bloody struggle for Sudan itself: for freedom, safety and the possibility of love.
River Spirit is the story of a people who, against the odds and for a brief time, gained independence from foreign rule. This is a powerful tale of corruption and unshakeable devotion – to a cause, to one’s faith and to the people who become family.
Buy it from Saqi here.
Children of Gebelawi / Children of the Alley
Children of Gebelawi (also known as Children of the Alley) is a 1959 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz. The novel is an allegorical tale of the people and events intersecting in a specific alley in Cairo, depicting the rise and clash of the three major monotheistic religions of the world. Mahfouz was condemned in the Arabic world for the work and subject to violence and abuse due to its publication.
The story begins with the introduction of Adham, the favorite son of the wealthy Gebelawi; an intimidating man with many sons, all of whom fear and respect him. Gebelawi’s eldest, Idris, rebels against his father’s commands and insults him, and Gebelawi grows furious and throws Idris out of his house. Idris remains outside the house, living in poverty and filth and shouting insults at his father. One day he manages to catch Adham alone and attempts to lure him into a plot against Gebelawi. Adham resists, but Idris does better when he speaks with Adham’s wife, Omayma, telling her that Gebelawi’s will is hidden in his inner sanctum and sowing doubt that she and her husband will be rewarded for their loyalty. Omayma prevails on Adham to break into the private room and steal his father’s will in order to see what their inheritance will be. Gebelawi catches Adham and banishes him and Omayma from the house. As Adham and Omayma move into the nearby alley to live in poverty and disgrace, Idris gets drunk and dances, celebrating.
Gebelawi grows older and retreats into his mansion, closing the doors and refusing to respond to cries for help from his descendants outside. Outside the mansion, life in the alley grows terrible, as bullies use violence and intimidation to dominate the weak, and a select few live in comfort while everyone else lives in terrible conditions. Gebel, Gebelawi’s grandson and a snake-charmer, sees the conditions in the alley and is moved to do something about it. Gebel gathers followers and leads them out of the alley, fighting those who would oppose them and establishing their own space where they will live according to the harsh—but just—laws that Gebel sets down for them. Gebel is incorruptible and passionate for justice, making him an uncompromising but effective ruler of his people.
Available to buy online or to borrow from the Arab British Centre library.
An Unlasting Home
A family saga that tells of the heart-stopping triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women.
Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University, having returned from the US in the wake of her mother’s death eleven years earlier. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she recognises less and less. When she is accused of blasphemy – a capital crime – she begins to unravel, falling deeper into despair when Maria, the one constant figure in her life, has a sudden heart attack.
Awaiting trial, Sara realises she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all. She retraces the past, intent on examining the lives of the women who made her. Amongst these women are her grandmothers: beautiful, stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of a pasha to her eventual regret, and Lulwa, born poor and later swept off to India by her wealthy merchant husband.
Spanning Lebanon, Iraq, India, the United States and Kuwait, An Unlasting Home is an unforgettable family portrait.
Buy it from Saqi here.
Read Alia Ragab’s review for our blog, here.
Farewell Damascus
The book opens as Zain Khayyal, a university student and aspiring young writer, plots an early-morning escape from her house as her husband slumbers. Her mission: to get an illicit abortion, plans for which she’s divulged to no one, and to announce that she wants out of her stifling marriage. A rebel and a trail-blazer par excellence, Zain draws down the wrath of polite society and the authorities, political and religious alike, as she challenges attitudes and practices that demean rather than dignify, and a ruling regime that sucks the life out of both oppressed and oppressor. As the plot unfolds, Zain finds her way as a student to a neighbouring country which, though it grants her the freedom, respect and appreciation she had lacked in her homeland, becomes a place of anguished exile.
Armed with her accustomed humour, pathos and knack for suspense, Samman fearlessly tackles issues that roil societies across the globe to this day: the stigma that attaches to the divorced woman but not the divorced man; whether to choose a life partner for love, or for social status, prestige and material security; whether abortion is a crime or a means of forestalling needless undeserved suffering; lesbian intimacy as a declaration of freedom from male abuse and tyranny; rape as an instrument of humiliation and subjugation and unconditional acceptance as healing balm. Farewell, Damascus is both a paean to a beloved homeland and an ode to human dignity.
Buy it from Darf here.
Diary of a Country Prosecutor
A hilarious classic of Egyptian literature, documenting the trials and tribulations of an exhausted prosecutor in a rural village.
Who shot Kamar al-Dawla Alwan? Why? What does the beautiful peasant girl Rim have to do with it? And is mysterious Sheikh Asfur as mad as he seems?
1920s Cairo. A young and ambitious prosecutor is dispatched from the bustling city to a provincial village to investigate a serious crime. Armed with his European education, the prosecutor is confident that he will dispense justice in this rural outpost. But as he becomes engrossed in village life, he finds himself increasingly befuddled by an alien legal system and the clueless bureaucrats who enforce it. As he teases out the facts of the case only one thing becomes clear: justice is never as simple as it seems.
First published in 1937, Diary of a Country Prosecutor takes aim at a self-interested ruling class and the hapless public servants at their disposal. Both a comedy of errors and a trenchant social satire, this classic by one of the Arab world’s leading dramatists has lost none of its bite.
Buy it from Saqi here.
Discretion
A warm, intimate portrait of a French-Algerian working-class family.
When Yamina left Algeria behind along with the remains of her beloved fig tree, she hoped she would be creating a better life for her family in Paris. At the very least, an easier one.
But Yamina’s children aren’t convinced. Omar wonders whether he can change course as he watches the world pass him by from the driver’s seat of his Uber. His sisters are tired of being considered either too French or too Arab, and of having to prove their allegiances. Together, the siblings learn that resistance takes many forms as they set out to preserve the stories of their past.
Discretion touchingly evokes the realities of a family as they attempt to carve out a future for themselves in France.
Buy it from Saqi here.