From the secrets of childhood to the horrors of the Lebanese Civil War, Andree Chedid draws us into worlds that we have forgotten or never known. In “Between the Worlds Chedid” vividly evokes a host of characters living very different lives in Europe and the Middle-East, all the time teasing out insights into the nature […]
Issa J Boullata’s characters are mainly emigrants to Canada and the USA from Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. George, Kamal, Mayy, Abdullah, Nadia, William, all have to begin their lives again, learn how to deal with their memories, with pasts that cannot be relived, with exile and loss. How do you settle into a new […]
This is a historical novel of medieval Egypt. Egypt in the ninth century AD: an Arab, Muslim ruling class governs a country of mostly Coptic-speaking Christians. After an exorbitant land tax imposed by the caliph’s governors sparks a peasant revolt, Bedeir is dispatched to the marshlands of the Nile Delta as an escort for a […]
The Yacoubian Building holds all that Egypt was and has become over the 75 years since the actual building was built on one of downtown Cairo’s main boulevards. From the pious son of the building’s doorkeeper and the raucous, impoverished squatters on its roof, via the tattered aristocrat and the gay intellectual in its apartments, […]
An extraordinarily powerful story which transcends the media coverage of the Middle East, “De Niro’s Game” is a breathtaking, timely and moving novel about two young men coming of age in war-torn Beirut. While Bassam becomes obsessed with leaving Beirut, George amasses power in the militia-ruled underworld, and lives a life of violence and crime […]
“Maryam’s Maze” is an enigmatic novel by one of the most promising authors of a vibrant new generation of Egyptian writers. Set in the house of Yusuf el Tagi, “Maryam’s Maze” relates the story of a woman struggling to find her way through the confusion of the world around her. Using the literary device of […]
When Salma becomes pregnant before marriage in her small village in the Levant, her innocent days playing the pipe for her goats are gone for ever. She is swept into prison for her own protection. To the sound of her screams, her newborn baby daughter is snatched away. In the middle of the most English […]
In this extraordinary novel based on a true story Tahar Ben Jelloun traces the experiences of Salim who, in 1971, took part in a failed coup attempt to oust King Hassan II of Morocco and was incarcerated in a secret desert prison complex for nearly 20 years. A wrenching yet exquisite celebration of the human […]
Mahfouz reaches back thousands of years to bring us tales from his homeland’s majestic early history?tales of the Egyptian nobility and of war, star-crossed love, and the divine rule of the pharoahs. In Khufu’s Wisdom, the legendary Fourth Dynasty monarch faces the prospect of the end of his rule and the possibility that his daughter […]
“Basrayatha” is a literary tribute by author Muhammad Khudayyir to the city of his birth, Basra, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in southern Iraq. Just as a city’s inhabitants differ from outsiders through their knowledge of its streets and stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real city of Basra and the imagined city he created […]