Kamila is nine years old when she is taken from the poverty of her childhood village in southern Lebanon to Beirut. She has never learned to read or write though she longs to go to school. Stories, poetry and film are her passion – and a beautiful boy called Muhammad. They fall in love before […]
In 1908 Arthur Wavell left England to begin his journey to Mecca, determined to find out more about Arab customs with a view to future adventures into the unexplored interior of Arabia. Due to the suspicion a westerner would arouse, and the fact that unbelievers were forbidden by the authorities to enter Mecca, he undertook […]
Alexandre was eight when Lebanon erupted into a bloody and brutal conflict; he was twenty-three when the guns at last fell silent. After seven years of voluntary exile spent clearing his mind of the unbearable nightmare of civil war, he is now back amongst his family and friends, and the past is quickly catching up […]
Walking Through Fire is the second volume of Nawal El Saadawi’s autobiography, the story of her extraordinary adult life. We read of her work as a rural doctor, her attempts to set up women’s organizations and to publish magazines and exile after her name appeared on a death list. She talks candidly of her personal […]
Over two decades of turmoil and change in the Middle East, steered via the history-soaked landscape of Palestine. This new edition includes a previously unpublished epigraph in the form of a walk. When Raja Shehadeh first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was travelling through a […]
“Memories of Eden” evokes a bygone era – when pre-WW2 Baghdad was one-third Jewish and interfaith relations were harmonious. When Violette was born, Mesopotamia had been Ottoman for some 600 years, until redrawn as Iraq by the British when Violette was eight years old. This bittersweet memoir tells of a childhood spent in the city […]
Summoned by his dying mother, Palestinian-born Aziz Shihab returns to the homeland he and his family fled as refugees decades earlier: to a Palestine reclaimed by Israelis and to a country no longer that of his youth in a nation whose estate has been challenged by history. This gripping book chronicles that month-long journey. Part […]
From the melting pot that was Iraqi society comes a tale, recounted by a grand old man of Canadian letters, of growing up as a Jewish boy in Baghdad in the 1940s. Naim Kattan was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Baghdad in 1928. He, his brother, and his friend Nessim were the only […]
‘If there is a man who can read “The Prophet” without a singing in the heart as of music born within, that man is indeed dead to life and truth’ – “The Chicago Post”. Author of the international bestseller “The Prophet”, Kahlil Gibran and his work remain influential to this day. President John F. Kennedy […]