WINNER OF THE 2025 SAIF GHOBASH BANIPAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC LITERARY TRANSLATION"An evocative, unpredictable novel."—Words Without BordersA breathtaking novel of longing, uncertainty, and ultimately of hopeAzzan is a beekeeper in a rural community in Oman. Devoted to tending his bees and searching for wild hives, he encounters Thamna, a lone shepherd woman, on a mountain slope and is captivated by her and her ...

Hassan Daoud is one of the Arabic language world's premier novelists, with a good media profile. He is the editor of the cultural supplement in Beirut's daily paper, and his work has appeared in the European and American press as well -- he was published in 2006 in the New York Times Magazine.Four of Daoud's novels have been translated into English, and this work has been long listed for the Arabic Booker Prize, and The Penguin's Song was hailed as the "Best Arabic Novel of the Yea...

This novel of home and homelessness, of exile both physical and psychological, centers on Kimi, a fragile heroine suffering from a rift in her persona, unable to distinguish between her own pain and the pain of others. For Kimi it is not a simple case of to be or not to be, but rather of how to be in disjointed and contrary times. Leaves of Narcissus, like earlier Arabic novels about East-West encounters by male writers such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, and Tayeb Salih, is about a you...

A deeply compassionate portrait of a cosmopolitan group of friends—a glimpse of the volatility of life under totalitarian rule, from Egypt's most celebrated contemporary novelist.It is 1964 in Alexandria. Nasser has risen to power and, faced with the upheaval of his regime, many Alexandrians fled Egypt. But this particular group of locals and European expats have instead chosen to stay. They gather nightly in the bar upstairs at the elegant waterfront restaurant Ar...

Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for LiteratureA Top 100 Literary Work of the Twentieth Century (The Arab Writers Union)"Absorbing . . . Superbly translated . . . . Arguably the best modern [Egyptian] novel not written by Nobel laureate Mahfouz."—Kirkus ReviewsA landmark in women's writing set during the struggle for Egyptian independenceFebruary 1946: Cairo is engulfed by demonst...

In a small Lebanese village a disillusioned imam, diagnosed with terminal cancer, must face his demons. Having consented to an arranged marriage, he has found himself in a loveless union and lusts after another. To please his family, he took up the robe and turban of his forefathers but the expected path to fulfillment did not unfold before him. Meticulous, sparse prose quietly evokes the essence of rural life and the burden of tradition. Hassan Daoud's masterful novel plumbs the depths of...

'Let us go on, then! And I will tell you the story of my sister and her daughter, from beginning to end.' Alis al-Bustani's Sa'iba (1891) is one of the earliest known novels authored in Arabic by a female writer. Written when the Arabic novel was only in its third or fourth decade, it takes up the leading fictional theme of the era: the question of young people's choices in marriage in a society where their elders traditionally made these decisions. In Sa'iba

'Let us go on, then! And I will tell you the story of my sister and her daughter, from beginning to end.' Alis al-Bustani's Sa'iba (1891) is one of the earliest known novels authored in Arabic by a female writer. Written when the Arabic novel was only in its third or fourth decade, it takes up the leading fictional theme of the era: the question of young people's choices in marriage in a society where their elders traditionally made these decisions. In Sa'iba

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2019‘A beautiful book, which teaches us a great deal about the swiftly changing relations between men and women and between the generations.’ TLSSet in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada....

The new novel from the first Arabic-language winner of the Booker International Prize.In their small, mountainside village, Ghazaala and Asiya love each other like sisters, until tragedy strikes, and Asiya is forced into exile. Ghazaala is haunted by Asiya’s absence; a wound that never quite heals.When Ghazaala falls in love with a handsome violinist, everything changes. In Muscat, she tries desperately to balance university and the demands of a new wife. T...

Zaynab Fawwaz (d. 1914) emerged from an obscure childhood in the Shi'I community of Jabal 'Amil (now Lebanon) to become a recognized writer on women's and girls' aspirations and rights in 1890s Egypt. This book insists on the centrality of gender as a marker of social difference to the Arabic knowledge movement then, or Nahda. Fawwaz published essays and engaged in debates in the Egyptian and Ottoman-Arabic press, published two novels, and the first play known to have been composed in Arab...

**Translated by Marilyn BoothShort****listed for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2023Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award**An extraordinary novel from a Man Booker International Prize-winning author that follows one young Omani woman as she builds a life for herself in Britain and reflects on the relationships that have made her from a “remarkable” writer who has “constructed her own novelistic form” (James Wood, The New Yorker).