Fifteen-year-old Doria isn’t in a good place. Or to be precise: she’s in the sadly misnamed Paradise Estate on the outskirts of Paris. Her father has gone off back Morocco to find a wife who can give him a boy, and her illiterate, non French speaking mother has to fend for herself with a cleaning […]
One morning Mustafa Ali Noman, a teacher in Baghdad, is arrested as he reaches the school gates. For the next 15 months he is brutally interrogated, shuttles from prison to prison and barred from contacting his family. The question of guilt or innocence clearly irrelevant, Mustafa must fight to retain a grip on reality. ‘How […]
The stories in The Tree are selections from Abdallah Al-Nasser’s previously published story collections, especially The Mirage and The Snow Siege, which both appeared in 2002. Dina Bosio and Christopher Tingley translated The Tree from Arabic, and their translation reads very well; Salma Khadra Joyyusi contributes a helpful introduction to the collection.
Egypt on the eve of the 1973 October war. A young man has been drafted into the army. His father, the village elder, persuades a poor night-watchman to send his own son as a stand-in but the impersonation plan goes horribly wrong with tragic-comic results. This tale of the fiasco ? steeped in irony and […]
The moufflon, a wild sheep prized for its meat, continues to survive in the remote mountain desert of southern Libya. Only Asouf, a lone bedouin who cherishes the desert and identifies with its creatures, knows exactly where it is to be found. Now he and the moufflon together come under threat from hunters who have […]
Disciples of Passion chronicles the civil war in Lebanon through the troubled and sometimes quasi-hallucinatory mind of a young man who has experienced kidnapping, hostage exchange, and hospital internment. As he recalls his village childhood and recounts his relationship with a woman of a different faith, his fragmented narrative probes the uncertainties of political testimonial […]
‘Aboulela paints a fascinating picture of intercultural strife Aboulela has chosen a complex structure and keeps perfect control of it. Beautifully written, restrained and lyrical, Minaret is both thought-provoking and disturbing’ Independent ‘This is the modern female voice young, fresh, diverse, challenging, uninhibited’ Rachel Cusk ‘This is a beautiful, daring, challenging novel’ Guardian ‘Instead of […]
A prize-winning novel exploring the invisible lives caught up in the petroleum industry. It pictures rather than states the desolation brought about when market values take over and ravages ensue. “The Other Place” was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1996.
During the 1956 Suez War-or the Tripartite Aggression, as it is known in Egypt-life in Alexandria goes on. The railroad workers and their families live in the low-income housing of el-Masakin, along the Mahmudiya Canal, but some of them take us on forays into the other, cosmopolitan Alexandria, whose European denizens, mainly Greeks, Italians, and […]
Welcome to the fried zone: where plastic surgery meets the emotional intensity of Um Kalsoum and Lebanese foodies go on the rampage. This is Beirut: a melee of pop culture chafing at Mid East traditions. In words and pictures, Transit: Beirut is an anthology of complex urban experience. The view is wide: from fiction to […]