It is Christmas Day in the year 710 AD in Toledo, capital of Visigoth Spain. King Wittiza has been dethroned, and the impulsive and tyrannical Roderic has been installed as monarch of Spain with the help of the Catholic clergy. Even so, Bishop Oppas, the deposed king’s brother, is to remain as the senior ecclesiastical […]
The town of Sarmada, Arabic for ‘perpetuate’ or ‘the eternally-not-changed’, is the novel’s fictitious setting. Women are the protagonists of this story, that spans several generations and extends from Syria to Paris and back again. Sarmada is set in the Druze area and is a declaration of love for tolerance and for the peaceful coexistence […]
After 85 long years, Fatimah Abdullah is dying, and she knows when her time will come. In fact, it should come just nine days from tonight, the 992nd nightly visit of Scheherazade, the beautiful and immortal storyteller from the epic The Arabian Nights. Just as Scheherazade spun magical stories for 1,001 nights to save her […]
Banned in many Arab countries and where it was not, an instant bestseller, The Proof of Arab Honey is a superb celebration of female pleasure – a tribute to sex, eroticism, language and liberty.
This prize-winning novel portrays the shallowness of the petrodollar culture and the price one pays for quick money. The protagonist, an educated middle-class Egyptian from Alexandria, describes his experiences and those of migrant workers and professionals in one of the Gulf states, and their interaction with the oil-rich country’s local elite and with agents of […]
Cairo, Mother of the World, embraces millions—but some of her children make their home in the streets, junked up and living in the shadows of wealth, among the monuments that the tourists flock to see. Mustafa, a former student radical who never believed in the slogans, sets out to tell their story, but he has […]