It’s hard to imagine a debut more thrilling than Youssef Rakha’s groundbreaking ‘The Book of the Sultan’s Seal’. The novel is made up of nine chapters, each centered on a drive our hero, Mustafa Çorbaci, takes around greater Cairo post-9/11. In a series of visions, Çorbaci encounters the spirit of the last Ottoman sultan and […]
Back in the dog days of the early twenty-first century a pair of lovebirds fleeing a murder charge in Cairo pull in to Alexandria’s main train station. Fugitives, friendless, their young lives blighted at the root, Ali and Injy set about rebuilding, and from the coastal city’s arid soil forge a legend, a kingdom of […]
‘Love always sits in a seat other than the one we were expecting it to, right alongside the place where we expected love to be’ In the midst of the Algerian civil war, Hayat is a young novelist trapped in a loveless marriage. While her husband, a high-ranking officer, preoccupies himself with politics, Hayat finds […]
“I had many things in mind that I wanted to achieve before the Frenchwoman Katia arrived…” So begins the story of Amir Tag Elsir’s French Perfume as told by Ali Jarjar — the town gossip and schemer of a poor community rich with sleazy bachelors, desperate women, soothsayers and secret police. Tasked to introduce his […]
Rashid al-Daif’s provocative novel Who’s Afraid of Meryl Streep? takes an intimate look at the life of a recently married Lebanese man. Rashoud and his wife struggle as they work to negotiate not only their personal differences but also rapidly changing attitudes toward sex and marriage in Lebanese culture. As their fragile bond disintegrates, Rashoud […]
A chance encounter on a plane throws together Doha, a fashion designer unhappily married to a leading figure in the Mubarak regime, and Ashraf, an academic and leading dissident. The story of their relationship and Doha’s self-discovery runs alongside a young Egyptian’s search for the mother he never knew, and these intersecting narratives unfold against […]
With its satirical and semi-journalistic style, Chewing Gum is an existential quest to understand how a society exists beneath a repressive dictatorship. The rhythmic act of chewing relentlessly continues as individuals, time and land turn to waste. In this debut novel, no one escapes the critical gaze of a writer who witnessed first-hand the brutality […]
“A novel that dares to ask questions we are afraid to ask and reveals sides to ourselves we did not know ever existed. It is a self-discovering journey.” – Rafael Reig Saleem, fed up with all the violence, religiosity, and strict family hierarchies of his Iraqi village, flees to Spain to establish a new life […]
A master of the short story form, Muhammad Zafzaf is one of Morocco’s greatest narrative writers. This anthology, the first collection of his work translated into English, is a tribute to the remarkable influence he exerted on an entire generation of Moroccan storytellers. Zafzaf’s stories are set within a variety of contexts, each portraying a […]
As war wreaks havoc on the historic heart of Beirut, tenants of the old city are pushed to the margins and obliged to live on the surrounding hillsides, where it seems they will stay forever, waiting, as the dream of return becomes a way of life. “The Penguin” is a physically deformed young man who […]