After a failed study mission in France, Abd al-Rahman returns home to Iraq to launch an existentialist movement akin to that of his hero, Jean-Paul Satre. Meanwhile, his wealth and family prestige guarantee him an idle life spent in drinking, debauchery, and frequenting a well-known nightclub. But soon he is contemplating suicide as an act […]
Morning and Evening Talk is an epic tale of Egyptian life over five generations. Set in Cairo, it traces the fortunes of three families from the arrival of Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century to the 1980s. As the intricate family saga unfolds, a powerful picture of a society in transition emerges. This […]
Set in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk during the 1950s, The Last of the Angels tells the slyly humorous tale of three strikingly different people in one small neighborhood: the revolutionary Hameed Nylon, the butcher Khidir Musa, and a young boy named Burhan Abdullah who discovers an old chest that lets him talk to […]
Poor is the story of a life of hardship, adversity, and emotional starvation. It is also the story of opportunities squandered and hopes traded away for nothing. Idris Ali’s confessional novel begins on an unbearably hot August afternoon in downtown Cairo, where the Nubian narrator has just decided, once and for all, to end his […]
No matter how hard Rachid tries to recreate himself, to become educated and wordly – to ‘learn English’ – it is impossible for this hip Beiruti with his cell phone and high-speed internet to sever the connection to his past in the Lebanese village of Zgharta, know for its ‘tough guys’ and old-fashioned clan mentality. […]
The four interlocking narratives that make up this extraordinary novel belong to four women who live in the same apartment building in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. There is Lilian with her two children, desperate to emigrate, with or without her husband. Warda cannot recover from the loss of her daughter, and finds that […]
This story begins with adolescent love as Wafaa, a young Egyptian girl, says with a sense of fun and humor: “It was Saturday. I remember. And while he was standing on a step ladder in the hall, changing a light bulb in the faint light coming through the window, I decided to love him.” Raised […]
Suhaila lies in a coma in a Paris hospital. The loved ones of the title are the constellation of friends, predominantly women, who flock to Suhaila’s side from all over the world to envelop her in the warmth of friendship that may ultimately save her and enable her rebirth. Suhaila comes alive through the stories […]
Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until Mona. When Nuri first sees Mona, sitting in her bright yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina holiday resort, the […]