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 […]
A city – known for its light-heartedness, vibrancy and capacity for fun – is ripped apart by war. A young man – full of the vim, vigour and desires of youth – refuses to allow his spirit to be dampened . . . November, 1980. An Egyptian writer has chosen the wrong time to come […]
A Land without Jasmine is a sexy, satirical detective story about the sudden disappearance of a young female student from Yemen’s Sanaa University. Each chapter is narrated by a different character beginning with Jasmine herself. The mystery surrounding her disappearance comes into clearer focus with each self-serving and idiosyncratic account provided by an acquaintance, family […]
Product Description You are bored, bored, bored, stuck in a half-job, berated by your parents and unsure whether you should marry your cousin. You want to change. A chance encounter on Facebook leads you to Emmie and her underground world of strange fashion, drinking, dancing, sex, and drugs. You become an Emo and discover philosophical […]
Review This nuanced portrait of Gertrude Stein, presented through the eyes of a fictional male lover from Morocco known only as Muhammad, comes from noted Moroccan journalist and poet Najmi (A Little Life). The narrator, a poet and journalist named Abu Hasan, befriends the elderly Muhammad, who claims that during his younger days, he met […]
Review Remarkable, insightful … The elegiac quality is present not just in the themes, but also in the astonishingly poetic language throughout . I stopped and marvelled every few pages … This is one of the richest and most evocative books that I have read all year, I only hope we don’t have to wait […]
Review “[Moon & Henna Tree] set in an unspecified time period in pre-modern Morocco, explores power, marriage and relationships as uses that transcend time and space […] Despite the story’s many traditional features such as dreams of Circassian wives and local bards predicting the shape of things to come in poetic utterances, Toufiq plays with […]
Review Abdo Khal shines a light on life at the bottom of the heap, in Saudi’s often forgotten villages. His voice blends image-rich poetic classicism with contemporary patois, which makes for an unmistakably Arab mix (The Guardian, UK) Khal writes vividly and poetically … [a] powerful and deeply troubling book (Sholto Byrnes National) A novel of […]
About the Book ‘Did I live many lives or only one life enough for many women?’ asks Miriyam in ‘Other Lives’. This third novel by Lebanese writer, Iman Humaydan, starkly and poignantly demonstrates how war, violence and dislocation have an impact not only on the lives of people who live through them but on what life […]