The Scarecrow is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni’s Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community’s leader at the end of the previous novel, The Puppet. They punished […]
Cairo at the very end of Ottoman rule. Behind the doors of the Automobile Club of Egypt, Egyptian staff attend to the every need of Cairo’s European elite – the way they always have done, it seems. But soon the social upheaval out on the street will break its way through the club’s gilded doors, […]
In a crumbling colonial mansion besieged by slums in the old quarter of Algiers, Lamia lives a life of self-imposed isolation, communing only with her ghosts by day, working as a paediatrician by day. Her family are dead, but for her beloved brother Sofiane, who has become a harraga – one of those who risk […]
Where Pigeons Don’t Fly follows Fahd, a boy growing up in Riyadh, from early childhood to the point where he flees Saudi Arabia to Britain in search of greater personal freedom. Fahd’s childhood is traumatised by his father’s involvement in the armed attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and his subsequent premature […]
Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born on the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their days at work, their married and unmarried lives, and the two books they are writing, both called Specters. This lively metafictional novel is a mix of genres: part autobiography, part oral history, part […]
A Portal in Space, set in Basra, Iraq, during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), follows the lives of Anwar, a newly minted architect, and the other members of his affluent family as they attempt to maintain a sense of normality during the frequent bombing attacks from Iran. When Anwar joins the Iraqi army and then goes […]
This award-winning collection of seventy-eight pieces of flash fiction presents an intense and powerful vision of today’s world seen through the eyes of an alienated and sardonic author. The Perception of Meaning reads like an alternative history to our world—a collage of small nightmares brought to life by a canon of unlikely historical figures, including […]
A complex, realist novel that offers fascinating insights into the daily lives and complex humanity of the marginalised people of Sudan – a classic, failed postcolonial nation state. It explores – in almost ethnographic detail – the complexities of modern Sudanese society; The Jungo is the masterpiece of contemporary Sudanese literature.
Haroun, the cat, likes nothing better than to spend his days sleeping in the sunlit courtyards of Damascus. But one thing always ruins his sleep: jasmine! Haroun can’t stand the sweet-scented flowers. Their pollen sends him into fits of sneezes! So one day, Haroun hatches a plan to fix the problem. But little does he […]
A fascinating portrait of a pre-Gaddafi society on the verge of change. Tripoli in the 1960s. A sweltering, segregated society. Hadachinou is a lonely boy. His mother shares secrets with her best friend Jamila while his father prays at the mosque. Sneaking through the sun-drenched streets of Tripoli, he listens to the whispered stories of […]