Land of No Rain

by Amjad Nasser

Land of No Rain takes place in Hamiya, a fictional Arab country run by military commanders who treat power as a personal possession to be handed down from one generation to the next. The main character was forced into exile from Hamiya twenty years earlier for taking part in a failed assassination attempt on the military ruler known as the Grandson. On his return to his homeland, he encounters family, childhood friends, former comrades and his first love, but most importantly he grapples with his own self, the person he left behind. Land of No Rain is a complex and mysterious story of the hardship of exile and the difficulty of return.

Review

Amjad Nasser’s Haythu la Tasqut al-Amtar, or Where the Rain doesn’t Fall (Dar al-Adab, Beirut), is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Nasser is an inspired poet and this work takes the precision and economy of his language into prose narrative for the first time. Gentle, sad, hopeful – a poet writing prose at his mature best. Watch out for the English translation. (Ahdaf Soueif The Guardian ‘Books of the Year 2011’)

Delightful and profound. Like any great work of real literature, LAND OF NO RAIN addresses the living in order to open a window for dialogue with the dead…’ – Elias Khoury (Elias Khoury)

Land of No Rain stands out as a poignant and subtly disquieting study of exile and duality and the consequent hollowness of a fractured existence away from the land of one’s birth. (Erika Banerji The National)

About the Author

Amjad Nasser, a Jordanian poet born in 1955, has written numerous volumes of poetry and several travel memoirs. He has worked for newspapers in Beirut and Cyprus and since 1987 he has lived in London where he is managing editor and cultural editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily newspaper. Land of No Rain is his first novel.