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A finalist for the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a compelling saga of two families that illuminates the lives of women in modern Tunisia
Tunisia, 1930s. Against the backdrop of a country in turmoil, in search of its identity, the lives and destinies of the members of two important upper-class families of Tunis intertwine: the Ennaifer family, with a rigidly conservative and patriarchal mentality, and the Rassaa, open-minded and progressive.
One terrible night in December 1935, the destiny of both families changes forever when Zbaida Ali Rassaa, the young wife of Mohsen Ennaifer, is accused of having had a clandestine love affair with Tahar Haddad, an intellectual of humble origins known for his union activism and support for women's rights. The events of that fateful night are told by eleven different narrators, members of the two families, who recall them in different historical moments, from the 1940s to the present day. The result is a complex mosaic of secrets, memories, accusations, regrets, and emotions, taking the reader on an exciting journey through the stories of individuals caught up in the upheavals of history.
I found myself in our old house in El Abbassiya, visiting my mother. She received me with perplexing indifference and then left the room. I assumed she'd gone to make coffee, but she never returned. [Dream 216]
In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These last dreams, stunning poetic vignettes--now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar--appear here with dreamlike photographs by the famous American photographer Diana Matar, which both mysteriously rhyme with Mahfouz's nocturnal reveries and, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn, open up the texts. These sketches and stories are tersely haunting miniatures. Recurring female characters may be figures of Cairo herself, especially one much-missed lover from Mahfouz's youth. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women all float through these affecting brief tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in slumber. A tender and personal introduction by Hisham Matar, recollecting how he and his wife met Mahfouz in Cairo not long after the assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible.
Diary of a Country Prosecutor is an Egyptian comedy of errors. Partly autobiographical, it is written as the journal of a young public prosecutor posted to a village in rural Egypt. Imbued with the ideals of a European education, he encounters a world of poverty and backwardness where an imported legal system is both alien and incomprehensible.
The Scarecrow is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni's Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community's leader at the end of the previous novel, The Puppet. They punished him for opposing the use of gold in business transactions--a symptom of a critical break with their nomadic past--and now they must search for a leader who shares their fetishistic love of gold. A desert retreat inspires the group to select a leader at random, but their choice, it appears, is not entirely human. This interloper from the spirit world proves a self-righteous despot, whose intolerance of humanity presages disaster for an oasis besieged by an international alliance. Though al-Koni has repeatedly stressed that he is not a political author, readers may see parallels not only to a former Libyan ruler but to other tyrants--past and present--who appear as hollow as a scarecrow.
A raw, gripping and intensely moving account of the lives of eleven Egyptian women who, despite their different backgrounds, circumstances, and ages, have a truth that unites them all. These women will find their into your heart and stay there in this unforgettable collection of short stories.
The striking imagery and poetic prose of this collection of stories takes it to another level. I defy anyone to shed a few tears along the way, or to stop themselves from cheering at the highly unexpected but deeply satisfying twist at the end. Camellia Hamdy
Samar Saadallah is an author and women's rights activist who currently resides in Cairo, Egypt. To keep up with her updates on social media @samarssaadallah
Set in the late nineteenth century on a mythical island off the coast of Yemen, Radwa Ashour's Siraaj: An Arab Tale tells the poignant story of a mother and son as they are drawn inextricably into a revolt against their island's despotic sultan.
Amina, a baker in the sultan's palace, anxiously awaits her son's return from a long voyage at sea, fearful that the sea has claimed Saïd just as it did his father and grandfather. Saïd, left behind in Alexandria by his ship as the British navy begins an attack on the city, slowly begins to make his way home, witnessing British colonial oppression along the way.
Saïd's return brings Amina only a short-lived peace. The lessons he learned from the Egyptians' struggle against the British have radicalized him. When Saïd learns the island's slave population is planning a revolt against the sultan's tyrannical rule, both he and Amina are soon drawn in.
Beautifully rendered from Arabic into English by Barbara Romaine, Radwa Ashour's novella speaks of the unity that develops among varied peoples as they struggle against a common oppressor and illuminates the rich cultures of both the Arab and African inhabitants of the island. Sub-Saharan African culture is a subject addressed by few Arabic novelists, and Radwa Ashour's novella does much to fill that void.
Winner, National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association, 2015
Upon the death of their leader, a group of Tuareg, a nomadic Berber community whose traditional homeland is the Sahara Desert, turns to the heir dictated by tribal custom; however, he is a poet reluctant to don the mantle of leadership. Forced by tribal elders to abandon not only his poetry but his love, who is also a poet, he reluctantly serves as leader. Whether by human design or the meddling of the Spirit World, his death inspires his tribe to settle down permanently, abandoning not only nomadism but also the inherited laws of the tribe. The community they found, New Waw, which they name for the mythical paradise of the Tuareg people, is also the setting of Ibrahim al-Koni's companion novel, The Puppet.
For al-Koni, this Tuareg tale of the tension between nomadism and settled life represents a choice faced by people everywhere, in many walks of life, as a result of globalism. He sees an inevitable interface between myth and contemporary life.
Home to a mixed community of Muslims, Copts, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Indians, Europeans and Africans, Sur is plunged into turmoil by an extremist revolution orchestrated by the Righteous one. An obscure figure, the Righteous One is drawing followers from the poor and discontented to his jihad. Sur and all its communities represent the camp of apostasy and must be defeated. The city begins to prepare itself for the onslaught. Together with other young women, Khamila is led away to a house for female captives.
Kept in seclusion and guarded by eunuchs, these women are instructed in the new faith and readied for marriage and sexual servitude. Despairing of rescue and determined to resist her fate, Khamila learns she is to be married off to the Righteous One himself. She appears to be rescued by one of the eunuchs, Lulu, but awakens from her dream, again and again, to find herself still a captive.
The first book of this love epic starts in ancient Egypt loosely based off of the green God Osiris when Egypt used to be lush. The story takes place over many years and dives into a great love story between two of the main characters.
The first book of this love epic starts in ancient Egypt loosely based off of the green God Osiris when Egypt used to be lush. The story takes place over many years and dives into a great love story between two of the main characters.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (27 July 1857 - 23 November 1934) was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made numerous trips to Egypt and the Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920, he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.
E. A. Wallis Budge was born in 1857 in Bodmin, Cornwall, to Mary Ann Budge, a young woman whose father was a waiter in a Bodmin hotel. Budge's father has never been identified. Budge left Cornwall as a boy, and eventually came to live with his maternal aunt and grandmother in London.
Budge became interested in languages before he was ten years old, but left school at the age of twelve in 1869 to work as a clerk at the retail firm of W.H. Smith, which sold books, stationery and related products. In his spare time, he studied Biblical Hebrew and Syriac with the aid of a volunteer tutor named Charles Seeger. Budge became interested in learning the ancient Assyrian language in 1872, when he also began to spend time in the British Museum. Budge's tutor introduced him to the keeper of Oriental Antiquities, the pioneer Egyptologist Samuel Birch, and Birch's assistant, the Assyriologist George Smith. Smith helped Budge occasionally with his Assyrian. Birch allowed the youth to study cuneiform tablets in his office and obtained books for him from the British Library of Middle Eastern travel and adventure, such as Austen Henry Layard's Nineveh and Its Remains.
From 1869 to 1878, Budge spent his free time studying Assyrian, and during these years, often spent his lunch break studying at St. Paul's Cathedral. John Stainer, the organist of St. Paul's, noticed Budge's hard work, and met the youth. He wanted to help the working-class boy realize his dream of becoming a scholar. Stainer contacted W.H. Smith, a Conservative member of Parliament, and the former Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and asked them to help his young friend. Both Smith and Gladstone agreed to help Stainer to raise money for Budge to attend the University of Cambridge.
Budge studied at Cambridge from 1878 to 1883. His subjects included Semitic languages: Hebrew, Syriac, Ge'ez and Arabic; he continued to study Assyrian independently. Budge worked closely during these years with William Wright, a noted scholar of Semitic languages, among others. (wikipedia.org)
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (27 July 1857 - 23 November 1934) was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made numerous trips to Egypt and the Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920, he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.
E. A. Wallis Budge was born in 1857 in Bodmin, Cornwall, to Mary Ann Budge, a young woman whose father was a waiter in a Bodmin hotel. Budge's father has never been identified. Budge left Cornwall as a boy, and eventually came to live with his maternal aunt and grandmother in London.
Budge became interested in languages before he was ten years old, but left school at the age of twelve in 1869 to work as a clerk at the retail firm of W.H. Smith, which sold books, stationery and related products. In his spare time, he studied Biblical Hebrew and Syriac with the aid of a volunteer tutor named Charles Seeger. Budge became interested in learning the ancient Assyrian language in 1872, when he also began to spend time in the British Museum. Budge's tutor introduced him to the keeper of Oriental Antiquities, the pioneer Egyptologist Samuel Birch, and Birch's assistant, the Assyriologist George Smith. Smith helped Budge occasionally with his Assyrian. Birch allowed the youth to study cuneiform tablets in his office and obtained books for him from the British Library of Middle Eastern travel and adventure, such as Austen Henry Layard's Nineveh and Its Remains.
From 1869 to 1878, Budge spent his free time studying Assyrian, and during these years, often spent his lunch break studying at St. Paul's Cathedral. John Stainer, the organist of St. Paul's, noticed Budge's hard work, and met the youth. He wanted to help the working-class boy realize his dream of becoming a scholar. Stainer contacted W.H. Smith, a Conservative member of Parliament, and the former Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and asked them to help his young friend. Both Smith and Gladstone agreed to help Stainer to raise money for Budge to attend the University of Cambridge.
Budge studied at Cambridge from 1878 to 1883. His subjects included Semitic languages: Hebrew, Syriac, Ge'ez and Arabic; he continued to study Assyrian independently. Budge worked closely during these years with William Wright, a noted scholar of Semitic languages, among others. (wikipedia.org)
