Black Magic
29 January '14
Nasir, a photographer, meets Fatin, an independent woman who has escaped a suffocating marriage and is secure in taking what she wants from life. An affair begins that pulls Nasir into a whirlwind of erotic and emotional obsession. In a world of superficiality, materialism, and violence, a yearning for escape propels Nasir into a relationship […]
Siraaj: An Arab Tale
29 January '14
Set in the late nineteenth century on a mythical island off the coast of Yemen, Radwa Ashour’s “Siraaj: An Arab Tale” tells the poignant story of a mother and son as they are drawn inextricably into a revolt against their island’s despotic sultan. Amina, a baker in the sultan’s palace, anxiously awaits her son’s return […]
In A Fertile Desert
29 January '14
Here, for the first time, is a volume of short stories from this commercially and culturally vital and vibrant center of the Arab world—a selective sampling of a burgeoning literary output since the 1970s by the leading Arabic–English translator. Life before oil in this region was harsh, and many of the stories in this collection—by […]
The Zafarani Files
29 January '14
An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo’s old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the café owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband—all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher’s reports flow seamlessly into a […]
Taxi (Bloomsbury Qatar Publishing)
29 January '14
A best-selling modern masterpiece in the author’s home country of Egypt, Taxi consists of fifty-eight fictional monologues with Cairo taxi drivers that have been recreated from the author’s own experience, taking the reader on a roller-coaster of emotions as bumpy and noisy as the city’s potholed and chaotic streets. Described as an urban sociology, an […]
Utopia
29 January '14
A grim futuristic account of Egyptian society in the year 2023, “Utopia” takes readers on a chilling journey beyond the gated communities of the North Coast where the wealthy are insulated from the bleakness of life outside the walls. When a young man and a girl break out from this bubble of affluence in order […]
Lina: Portrait of a Damascene Girl
29 January '14
A revealing study of a girl and woman in middle-class Syria and of a family changing and sometimes barely surviving in the tumultuous days of 1950s Damascus.
Oppressors, The
29 January '14
Girls of Alexandria
29 January '14
REFERENCE This novel takes us back, to the Alexandria of the 30’s and 40’s. The protagonist is Mikhail whose narration weaves and loops back to his earliest childhood days. The girls of Alexandria inhabit every corner of his beloved city.