ARABIC LITERATURE

Translated from Arabic by Nirvana Tanoukhi

This volume deals with the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s in a post-modern, poetic style. The narrative focuses on the deranged, destabilized, confused, and hyper-perceptive state of mind created by living on the scene through a lengthy war. The story is filled with details that transcend the willed narcissism of the main character, while giving clues to the culture of the time. Issues of gender and identity are acutely portrayed against Lebanon's shifting national landscape.

Translated from Arabic by Abba Eban

Who shot Kamar al-Dawla Alwan? Was it a crime of passion? What was the role of the beautiful peasant girl Rim? Is the mysterious Sheikh Asfur as crazy as he seems?Diary of a Country Prosecutor is an Egyptian comedy of errors. Partly autobiographical, it takes the form of a 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.

Translator: Pierre Cachia

Tawfig al-Hakim (1899-1987) was one of the great formative figures of 20th-century Egyptian literature, along with such writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Taha Hussein. Immensely prolific and versatile, he was the first Arab to acquire a literary reputation as a dramatist. He was the author of more than 70 plays of remarkable variety, as well as a number of novels, short stories, and essays.This autobiography, covering the early part of al-Hakim's life until the mid-1930s, is an attempt by the author to understand himself. Besides the self-revelations, the book is a rare witness to the character of family and social relations of a not-too-distant generation. But even more valuable are the author's reminiscences about the Egyptian theatre in the first quarter of this century.

Translated from Arabic by Paul Starkey

The year is 1970, a period of identity crisis in the Arab world. Hisham, the young hero of Adama, is now a university student in the big city, Riyadh. He expands his intellect by day and pursues heady, forbidden pleasures by night, indulging in arak, cigarettes and an illicit affair with his neighbour Sarah, a bold young housewife. Meanwhile, Hisham's disillusioned childhood friend Adnan abandons his artistic ambitions in favour of a loftier cause, Islamism. The two friends grow apart, ultimately becoming strangers to each other. They come to symbolise the opposite extremes of life in a repressive closed society. Eventually, Hisham's world becomes untenable as he can no longer reconcile his studious days and licentious nights. This contradictions plunges him into intense turmoil and self-loathing, until his past catches up with him, with surprising consequences ...

Translators: Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden

A multi-layered novel about the depths of human experience and the struggle between polarities, Rama and the Dragon presents a love story of unrequited passion between Rama - the symbol of multiplicity and creativity - and Mikhail - the symbol of unity and constancy. Their story reflects the relationship not only between man and woman, Copt and Muslim, but also between Upper and Lower Egypt. Through a delicate grid of intertextual references and juxtaposed narratives, the dreams and hopes, fears and defeats of Rama and Mikhail move from the local to the global, corresponding to human dreams and anxieties everywhere.

Translated from Arabic by William M. Hutchins

A Tuareg youth ventures into trackless desert on a life-threatening quest to find the father he remembers only as a shadow from his childhood, but the spirit world frustrates and tests his resolve. For a time, he is rewarded with the Eden of a lost oasis, but eventually, as new settlers crowd in, its destiny mimics the rise of human civilisation. Over the sands and the years, the hero is pursued by a lover who matures into a sibyl-like priestess. The Libyan Tuareg author Ibrahim al-Koni, who has earned a reputation as a major figure in Arabic literature with his many novels and collections of short stories, has used Tuareg folklore about Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, to craft a novel that is both a lyrical evocation of the desert's beauty and a chilling narrative in which thirst, incest, patricide, animal metamorphosis, and human sacrifice are more than plot devices. The novel concludes with Tuareg sayings collected by the author in his search for the historical Anubis from matriarchs and sages during trips to Tuareg encampments, and from inscriptions in the ancient Tifinagh script in caves and on tattered manuscripts.

Bilingual Poetry

Translated from Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

Maram al-Massri is an Arab love poet for the modern age. She writes short, seductive lyrics of astonishing clarity and piercing candour, stringing them together like pearls in a story chain. This first English translation of her work draws together poems from two sequences. Her red cherry is like red lips, a fruit or drop of blood offered for the reader to taste in the poems, but abandoned to the coldness of the white-tiled floor, the white paper of the page. Her lines are anguished but tightly reined, breaking completely with traditional Arab love poetry to draw on everyday language as well as images and metaphors remembered and reinvented from childhood and the Koran.

Translated from Arabic by Catherine Cobham

London-based Lebanese author Hanan Al-Shaykh offers a refreshing window into the hidden Arab culture thriving in the heart of the capital. The novel concentrates on four characters over one hot summer as they weave in and out of each other's lives.

Translated from Arabic by Catherine Cobham

The Long Way Back tells the story of four generations of the same family living in an old house in the Bab al-Shaykh area of Baghdad. Through the layering of the overlapping worlds of the characters, their private conflicts and passions are set against the wider drama of events leading up to the overthrow of prime minister Abd al-Karim Qasim and the initial steps to power of the Baath party in Iraq in 1962-63.The building-up of the characters and their worlds within a brief and clearly determined period of recent history allows for a portrayal of the ambiguous strengths and weaknesses of Iraqi and wider Arab culture. The dramatization of the relationships between generations, social groups, and genders is achieved with a mixture of humour, irony and compassion.

Translator: Robin Bray

Through a sequence of dreams, flashbacks and conversations, Yacoub Iryan, a dying novelist, reflects upon his life, his achievements and his passionate, yet fleeting love affair with a married woman. Lying in his hospital bed, Iryan's conversations with his humourous nurse, Helen, his doctors and his fellow patients paint the picture of an intelligent and enlightened man obsessed with a memory that is fading as his body grows weaker. A Love Story is a poignant reflection on passionate, enduring love and the joys and tragedies of life.