Set in the turbulent years of Egypt before the 1952 revolution, Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth is a child’s-eye view of a boy coming of age in Cairo. The boy sneaks around, peeking through keyholes, learning about the hidden world if the adults as he struggles to free himself from his ailing, controlling father and to come […]
Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square. by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, […]
African Titanics is the untold tale of the African boat people and their desperate exodus to the merciless shores of the Mediterranean. The novel is one of fleeting yet profound friendships, perseverance born of despair and the power of stories to overcome the difficulties of the present. Alternating between fast-paced action and meditative reflection, the […]
By acclaimed Sudanese author Emir Tag Elsir, Ebola ’76 follows the story of Louis, a simple blue-collar worker who unwittingly transports a deadly disease back to his home country, with disastrous consequences for his family, friends and colleagues alike. In a series of bizarre and comical human encounters, the disease takes a firm hold of […]
The Confines of the Shadow is a sequence of novels and short stories that map the transformation of the Libyan city of Benghazi from a sleepy Ottoman backwater in the 1910s to the second capital of an oil-rich kingdom in the 1960s. Alessandro Spina’s saga begins in November 1912 with The Young Maronite, which sees […]
Najwa Barakat’s Oh, Salaam! tells the story of three friends – an explosives expert, a sniper, and a torturer – whose lives are transformed by their involvement in a civil war in an unnamed Arab country, and by their relationship with the novel’s antiheroine, Salaam. Two of the friends live to see the end of […]
Acclaimed and celebrated in the Arab world for its vivid portrait of Iraq, this heartbreaking novel confronts the war-torn nation’s horrifying recent history Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi’ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than […]
In eighteen-century Palestine, on the shores of Galilee’s Lake Tiberias, visionary political and military leader Daher al-Umar al-Zaydani undertakes a journey toward the greatest aim anyone could hope to achieve in his day: the establishment of an autonomous Arab state. To do so he must challenge the rule of the greatest power in the world […]
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 […]