It is the most diverse species on the planet and it inhabits the polluted, unforgiving streets of Cairo, a city that simply refuses to stand still. The taxi driver is an urban omnivore whose high-speed colours, habits and moods reflect all surrounding life, and yet pass it by, in the bustling flora and fauna of […]
In the author’s second novel written in English, he weaves an enthralling saga of a young family trying desperately, and perhaps idealistically, to break the unending cycle of warring clans. In the end, between tradition and modernity, tribal clans and individuals, between love and hate, between town and country – can there be any winners? […]
Evelyn Shakir crafts tales that are rich in history and cultural detail, setting her stories in different eras, from the 1960s to the present and carrying us back, on occasion, to the turn of the twentieth century. Each in their own way, Shakir’s first- and second-generation women work either to reclaim their Lebanese heritage or […]
In this deftly turned story, author Frances Khirallah Noble presents a tale that is at once sublimely comic and surprisingly erudite in the subjects it tackles. Its hero, Kahlil Gibran Hourani, is an ordinary, in fact rather bumbling, middle-aged Syrian American optician. On the eve of his fifty-third birthday Kali finds himself confronting seminal questions. […]
It is not long before the reader of Endings discovers that this drought is not just an occasional but an enduring condition faced by a community on the edge of the desert, the village of al-Tiba. Nowhere do we discover exactly where this village is on the map of the Arab world and al-Tiba thus […]
Liverpool, 1958, and German refugee and inventor Ernst Frager is in search of a sense of belonging. What he finds is an unusual nightclub on the Mersyside docks, and Miranda: hat-check girl, aspiring jazz singer and daughter of West Indian immigrants. Their doomed love affair will have repercussions for the children waiting for Ernst back […]
“Swimming Toward the Light” depicts a Lebanese immigrant family in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s and gives us entree into a male-dominated, independence-stifling culture where female roles were rigidly prescribed. While the three older children liberated themselves by leaving home, the two youngest daughters, Lottie and Irene, were left to endure their parents’ repressions and […]
In these nine vividly rendered short stories, the Cairo-born Soueif (The Map of Love, 2000) seems equally fascinated with the tenuous situations of immigrant women living in their adopted countries and with the difficulty of sustaining love in long-term relationships. In the title story, a pregnant woman develops dangerously high blood pressure and must be […]
This book is a collection of short stories varying in length from a few pages to a few lines, plus two essays by the author on “Talking about Writing”. Translated by Issa J Boullata, Elizabeth Whitehouse, Elizabeth Winslow and Christina Phillips. “Here is the brilliantly observed clutter and comedy of everyday lives, the lives of […]
After 17 years, the narrator and his friend, Ali, meet at Heathrow and slowly remember their past in Lebanon. Their memories are concentrated on one fatal night when they were with two other friends for the last time, before tragedy struck. But for the narrator, a personal tragedy had occurred much earlier… Both the narrator […]