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Sardines and Oranges
Twenty-six hard-hitting, passionate, moving, funny and human stories from North Africa by 21 authors from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia. Latifa Baqa, Ahmed Bouzfour, Rachida el-Charni, Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Dib, Tarek Eltayeb, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Gamal el-Ghitani, Said al-Kafrawi, Idriss el-Kouri, Ahmed el-Madini, Ali Mosbah, Hassouna Mosbahi, Muhammad Mustagab, Hassan Nasr, Rabia Raihane, Tayeb Salih, Habib Selmi, Izz al-Din Tazi and Mohammed Zefzaf. Many of these authors are major literary figures in their own countries, and the Arab world. They have broken with taboos and censorship, and established standards of innovation that have encouraged younger generations of authors. Pain, hardship, heartache, humour, identity, joy, loss and strategies for survival are universal themes and all are represented here, writes Peter Clark, who edited and introduces the stories, and is one of the thirteen translators of the volume.
Mansi
Tayeb Salih is internationally known for his classic novel Season of Migration to the North. With humour, wit and erudite poetic insights, Salih shows another side in this affectionate memoir of his exuberant and irrepressible friend Mansi Yousif Bastawrous, sometimes known as Michael Joseph and sometimes as Ahmed Mansi Yousif. Playing Hardy to Salih's Laurel Mansi takes centre stage among memorable 20th-century arts and political figures, including Samuel Beckett, Margot Fonteyn, Omar Sharif, Arnold Toynbee, Richard Crossman and even the Queen, but always with Salih's poet "Master" al-Mutanabbi ready with an adroit comment. "Mansi casts fresh light on the experiences and attitudes of a key generation of emigré and exiled Arab writers, thinkers and activists in the West" - Boyd Tonkin
Knife Sharpener
'This posthumous commemoration and celebration of Sargon Boulus is a collection of poems, written between 1991 and 2007 that he translated himself, together with an essay, Poetry and Memory, written a few months before he died.
Poems of Alexandria and New York
Ahmed Morsi is a renowned painter as well as a prolific art critic, journalist, translator, and, as this book reveals to a new audience, a consummate poet. Poems of Alexandria and New York, Ahmed Morsi's first volume in English translation, captures the modernity and empathy at the heart of all his works, his surrealistic humor, and his visions of the dramas of ordinary life. It comprises two of his best known collections, Pictures from the New York Album and Elegies to the Mediterranean, both written when he resumed writing poetry following a break of nearly 30 years after the calamitous Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. The former opens up the city of New York, his home since the mid-1970s and where he still lives and works, while the latter takes readers deep into abiding memories of the Mediterranean city of his birth, Alexandria, Egypt, in 1930.
Sarajevo Firewood
Sarajevo Firewood, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) award in 2020, explores the legacy of the recent histories of two countries - Algeria and Bosnia and Herzegovina - both of which experienced traumatic, and ultimately futile, civil wars in the 1990s. The novel narrates the lives of two main characters, with their friends and families: Salim, an Algerian journalist, and Ivana, a young Bosnian woman, both of whom have fled the destruction and hatred of their own countries to try to build a new life in Slovenia. As Ivana pursues her goal of writing her 'dream play', Khatibi's novel brings to life in fictional form the memories and experiences of the countless ordinary people who survived the atrocities linking the two countries. As such, it represents both a lasting memorial to the thousands of dead and 'disappeared' of the two countries' civil conflicts, and a powerful and novel exploration of the experience of exile to which so many have been subjected over the last few decades.
The Madness of Despair
The Madness of Despair tells the story of Maliha, who is living in London with her husband Nafie after an arranged marriage in their distant Arab homeland. ?The couple become good friends with Doctor Nadim, a fellow exile, but in the twists and turns of the friendship, the men's nostalgia for their old lives - and old ways of living - come into conflict with Maliha's ambition to live and love freely and make something of her new life now she's settled in London. Though ready to throw off the constraints of her disastrous marriage at the slightest turn, Maliha is ill-prepared for the fire of emotions that overcomes her, leading to unforeseen consequences for all three. It is a powerful narrative that reveals just how much psychological suffering and cultural displacement can upset the most ordinary of aspirations for life and love.
Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise
In 1986, when this autobiography opens, the author is a typical fourteen-year-old boy in Asyut in Upper Egypt. Attracted at first by the image of a radical Islamist group as "strong Muslims," his involvement develops until he finds himself deeply committed to its beliefs and implicated in its activities. This ends when, as he leaves the university following a demonstration, he is arrested. Prison, a return to life on the outside, and attending Cairo University all lead to Khaled al-Berry's eventual alienation from radical Islam. This book opens a window onto the mind of an extremist who turns out to be disarmingly like many other clever adolescents, and bears witness to a history with whose reverberations we continue to live. It also serves as an intelligent and critical guide for the reader to the movement's unfamiliar debates and preoccupations, motives and intentions. Fluently written, intellectually gripping, exciting, and often funny, Life Is More Beautiful than Paradise provides a vital key to the understanding of a world that is both a source of fear and a magnet of curiosity for the west.
Gate of the Sun
In a makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an ageing Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. His spiritual son Dr Khaleel - who has no real medical qualifications - nurses the older man, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness.
A Boat to Lesbos
A Boat to Lesbos, by Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah, was written as Syrian refugees endured frightening journeys across the Mediterranean before arriving on the small island. Set out like a Greek tragedy, it is dramatic witness to the horrors and ravages they suffered, seen through the eye of history, the poetry of Sappho and the travels of Odysseus.
The Book of the Sultan's Seal
A PROFOUNDLY ORIGINAL DEBUT FROM HIGHLY ACCLAIMED EGYPTIAN WRITER Youssef Rakha’s extraordinary The Book of the Sultan’s Seal was published less than two weeks after then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, following mass protests, in February 2011. It’s hard to imagine a debut novel of greater urgency or more thrilling innovation. Modeled on a medieval Arabic manuscript in the form of a letter addressed to the writer’s friend, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal is made up of nine chapters, each centered on a drive our hero, Mustafa Çorbaci, takes around greater Cairo in the spring of 2007. Together these create a portrait of Cairo, city of post-9/11 Islam. In a series of dr...
