Alexandra Chreiteh’s Ali and his Russian Mother is at once an ordinary and extraordinary story of two young people in Lebanon. At the outbreak of the July War in 2006, the novel’s unnamed young protagonist reconnects with her childhood friend and develops a little crush on him, as they flee the bombs unleashed upon their […]
A Sudanese writer begins to suspect that one of his most idiosyncratic characters from a recent novel resembles – in an uncanny, terrifying way – a real person he has never met. Since he condemned this character to an untimely death in the novel, should he attempt to save this real man from a similar […]
Even as a young man, Hamid Farsi is acclaimed as a master of the art of calligraphy. But as time goes by, he sees that weaknesses in the Arabic language and its script limit its uses in the modern world. In a secret society,he works out schemes for radical reform, never guessing what risks he […]
‘So it is good to eat bitter almonds because they make the sweet ones taste even better?’ Omar is an orphaned Palestinian born into chaos, displaced by violence, and driven by forces beyond his control to find his place in the world. He only has one thing to hold on to: a love that propels […]
Dublin is alien territory for young and impoverished Egyptian academic Moataz, who is preparing a PhD on Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Moataz has enough problems with his family’s high expectations and the unrequited, idealized love that he left behind in Cairo. Now he has to deal with cantankerous landlords, inscrutable local women, the Irish judiciary, […]
Naguib Mahfouz, famed for his uncanny power to depict the real world,is equally ingenious at capturing the surreal, the otherworldly, and the supernatural. The ghostly side of Mahfouz’s fiction, though less well known than his other works, nonetheless remains a haunting presence. This collection of stories sifted from his later writings brings these restless spirits […]
A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country’s growing hostility towards the West. A self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two classmates. A middle-aged man dying of cancer looks back on his […]
This is the story of a family as they struggle to survive in present-day Syria, seen through the eyes of a boy with a remarkable mind. Adam describes with unflinching accuracy the disintegrating world around him. Yasmine, his beautiful sister, tries to protect him, even as her own life is put in danger. When the […]
Why did he return to Beirut? Why did Karim leave his wife and children and the life he had built in France to return to a homeland still reeling from civil war? Was it to answer his brother Nasim’s call to raise a hospital out of the ashes? Was it to kick over the traces […]
An exiled Libyan doctor returns to his homeland and is disappeared by the regime. When he reappears in a Tripoli prison, his English wife ad their children travel to be near him. He is disappeared for a second time and years pass without word of him. How does this fractured family fare in an environment […]