"This is your last day. Be strong. Don't hesitate. Cut and run. An exit with no return." Idris Alis confessional novel opens with these words, spoken on an unbearably hot August afternoon in downtown Cairo, where the Nubian narrator has just decided, once and for all, to end his life. Delirious and thirsty, he wanders around venting his resentments large and small, his sexual frustrations, and his sense of powerlessness in the face of unremitting injustice. He seeks to expunge his failed l...

“I’m a simple village girl who has always obeyed the orders of my father and brothers. Since forever, I have learned to say yes to everything. Today I have decided to say no.”Nujood Ali's childhood came to an abrupt end in 2008 when her father arranged for her to be married to a man three times her age. With harrowing directness, Nujood tells of abuse at her husband's hands and of her daring escape. With the help of local advocates and the press, Nujood obtained he...

A gripping and beautiful novel from Elif Shafak, Booker-shortlisted author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange WorldOne rainy afternoon in Istanbul a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I want an abortion,' she announces. She is nineteen years old, and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life, and the lives of everyone around her.Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her exten...

The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif traces an Afghani refugee's extraordinary journey - from his early life as a shepherd boy in the mountains of Northern Afghanistan to his forcved exile after being captured and tortured by the Taliban to incarceration in an Australian detention centre ... and finally to freedom.

Does one honor one’s country or one’s heart? Malka Marom explores this classic dilemma in her stunningly powerful first novel, an extraordinary tale of people caught up in a violent and seemingly endless historical conflict, compelled by love and grief to transcend it.Sulha tells the story of Leora, who, twenty years after her husband was killed in the Sinai War, is empowered by law to decide whether or not to allow her only son to serve high-risk duty as his father did. As Abraham...

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Adrien Brody and Salma HayekIn the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the terrors of prison, and his wife feverishly searches for him, his children struggle with the realization that th...

When Arcade Publishing originally contracted this extraordinary collection of poetry and literature, the Department of the Treasury was attempting to censor the publication of works from countries on America’s “enemies list.” Arcade, along with the PEN American Center, the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, and the Association of American University Presses, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the United States government. Their landmark...

Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day of becoming a journalist, she was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Her father was in the import/export business and her mother was a doctor.Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. From that moment, Latifa, just 16 years old became a prisoner in her own home. Her school was closed. Her mother was banned from working. The simplest and most basic freedo...

An international bestseller and finalist for the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, The Age of Reinvention is a "suspenseful...Gatsby-esque odyssey...laced with provocative observations of prejudice, politics, and sexism" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).Top Manhattan criminal defense attorney Sam Tahar seems to have it all: fame, fortune, an enviable marriage to a prominent socialite, and two wonderful children. But his s...

The Hugo Award–winning author returns to the futuristic, high-tech Middle East setting of When Gravity Falls in this "major science fiction epic" ( Locus).In a world filled with so many puppets, strings tend to get tangled. In this follow-up to the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel When Gravity Fails, the Budayeen is still a very dangerous place, a high-tech Arabian ghetto where power and murder go hand in hand.Marid Audran used to be ...

When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael – a political dissident in exile – attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father’s story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.

It is 1957, and Amal is an inmate of the “Bethlehem Oasis for Troubled Women,” having feigned insanity to avoid being put to death for the murder of her abusive husband. When attacked by a fellow inmate, Amal must confront her traumatic memories.