Egyptian Muslims and Jews were not always at odds. Before the Arab-Israeli wars, before the mass exodus of Jews from Egypt, there was harmony.Offering an intimate yet panoramic view of the easy coexistence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in an old neighborhood of Cairo, this sweeping yet personal novel, spanning the 1930s to the 1960s, […]
This prize-winning novel; the first to be written by an Algerian woman in Arabic, is set against Algeria’s struggle against foreign domination as well as its post-independence struggle with itself and the fate of revolutionary ideals in a post-revolutionary society. The story, spanning more than four decades of Algerian history, from the 1940s to the […]
In this prize-winning novel, Nahid is a woman determined to go on a journey of self discovery and understanding. As we accompany her in her sometimes delirious, sometimes lucid journey, we are given rare glimpses of the inner thoughts and feelings of a woman confronting questions of love and intimacy within and outside of marriage. […]
In the beginning there was a rock deemed the point of creation of the cosmos and the place of assembly on the Day of Judgement. Then there was a dome built over the rock – the Dome of the Rock. Few sites in the world have been held as sacred, or has been fought over, […]
Trying to evade intelligence agencies out to assassinate him, the Cerebellum, an Egyptian scientist with a past association with the Iraqi nuclear program, rents a room on the roof of a brothel in a Cairo slum. His interaction with the other residents is limited; instead he spends most of his time in the virtual world, […]
Politics enters the lives of every family in Palestine. In this literary-historical tour de force, Suad Amiry traces the lives of individual members of Palestinian families and, through them, the histories of both Palestine and the emigre Palestinian community in other countries of the Middle East. Amiry mixes nostalgia with anger while mocking Israeli doublespeak […]
An Egyptian journalist in Iraq witnesses Saddam’s rise to power while investigating the disappearance of an Iraqi woman. What was it like to live in Iraq before the earth-shaking events of the end of the twentieth century? The mid seventies to the late eighties witnessed Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, the establishment of Kurdish autonomy […]
Palestine. For most of us, the word brings to mind a series of confused images and disjointed associations-massacres, refugee camps, UN resolutions, settlements, terrorist attacks, war, occupation, checkered kouffiyehs and suicide bombers, a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction. A powerful human story, following the life of a young girl from her days in […]
Land of No Rain takes place in Hamiya, a fictional Arab country run by military commanders who treat power as a personal possession to be handed down from one generation to the next. The main character was forced into exile from Hamiya twenty years earlier for taking part in a failed assassination attempt on the […]