Hoopoe Fiction
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Ebook
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The Night Will Have Its Say
A Novel
by Ibrahim Al-Koni
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
International Booker Prize finalist and "one of the Arab world's most innovative novelists" (Roger Allen) delivers a brilliant retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa
The year is 693 and a tense exchange, mediated by an interpreter, takes place between Berber warrior queen al-Kahina and an emissary from the Umayyad General Hassan ibn Nu'man. Her predecessor had been captured and killed by the Umayyad forces some years earlier, but she will go on to defeat them.
The Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during the seventh century CE, narrated from the perspective of the conquered peoples. Written in Ibrahim al-Koni's unique and enchanting voice, his lyrical and deeply poetic prose speaks to themes that are intensely timely. Through the wars and conflicts of this distant, turbulent era, he addresses the futility of war, the privilege of an elite few at the expense of the many, the destruction of natural habitats and indigenous cultures, and questions about literal and fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts.
Al-Koni's masterly account of conquest and resistance is both timeless and timely, infused with a sense of disaster and exile-from language, the desert, and homeland.
Ebook
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Gaza Weddings
A Novel
by Ibrahim Nasrallah
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Twin sisters Randa and Lamis live in the besieged Gaza Strip. Inseparable to the point that even their mother cannot tell them apart, they grow up surrounded by the random carnage that characterizes life under occupation. Randa, who wants to be a journalist, writes to record the devastation around her, taking pictures of martyred children. Meanwhile, their beloved neighbor Amna quietly converses with all those she has lost, as she plans the wedding of Lamis and her son Saleh. With their menfolk almost entirely absent, it is the women who take center stage in this poignant novel of resilience, determination, and living against the odds.
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Of Sea and Sand
A Novel
by Denyse Woods
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Gabriel Sherlock arrives in Oman in 1982, fleeing shame and disaster back home in Ireland, and begins an intense affair with a woman whom no one else has seen. Locals insist she must be one of the jinn-a supernatural being-but Gabriel refuses to buy into the folklore, despite her sudden, unexplained disappearance. Twenty-six years later, Irishwoman Thea Kerrigan lands in Muscat, chasing her own ghosts from the past, and is approached by Gabriel, who believes she is his lost lover. Certain that they have never met before, Thea is nonetheless drawn to this deluded, and perhaps dangerous, stranger and the rumors that surround him.
Ebook
(2)
Tales of Yusuf Tadros
A Novel
by Adel Esmat
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Tales of Yusuf Tadrus is set in the Egyptian Delta town of Tanta, and tells the story of a young Coptic artist from a humble background. It provides an intimate glimpse into Egyptian Christian life, and carefully tells of the struggles faced by an artist who seeks to remain true to his calling. Written with sensitivity and honesty, it addresses an array of social issues in Egypt's rapidly changing landscape, from fundamentalism to emigration.
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No Road to Paradise
A Novel
by Hassan Daoud
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
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 a man's struggle with religion and his place in the world.
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All the Battles
A Novel
by Maan Abu Taleb
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
When he first showed up at Captain Ali's run-down boxing club, Saed was mocked for his bourgeois manners then humiliated in the ring. After barely a year of training, he has been consumed by the world of boxing and tipped for greatness. As his star rises, Saed is faced with the challenger he came for, but at what cost? Maan Abu Taleb's debut novel is one of heady victories and crushing defeats. Driven by direct, lean prose, All the Battles is a compelling story of class, identity, and personal transformation.
Ebook
(1)
The Longing of the Dervish
A Novel
by Hammour Ziada
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
At the close of the nineteenth century, freed slave Bakhit is let out of prison with the overthrow of the Mahdist state in Sudan. On the brink of death, the memory of his beloved Theodora is all that has sustained him through seven years of grim incarceration-that and his vow to avenge her killing.
Set against a backdrop of war, religious fervor, and the monumental social and political upheavals of the time, The Longing of the Dervish is a love story in the most unlikely of circumstances.
Lyrical and evocative, Hammour Ziada's masterfully crafted novel is about sorrow, hope, and the cruelty of fate.
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Guard of the Dead
A Novel
by George Yaraq
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Aber scrapes a living in a Beirut hospital morgue by night, stealing from both the bodies he tends and his bosses. But he has a dark history that continues to haunt him. During the civil war, he fled his village for Beirut and, lost in the big city, joined a political party to survive. When he is kidnapped from the hospital, he knows he has not escaped his past and the many crimes he witnessed. But what or who is it that is still chasing him?
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The Televangelist
A Novel
by Ibrahim Essa
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Meet Egypt's top TV preacher Hatem el-Shenawi: a national celebrity revered by housewives and politicians alike for delivering Islam to the masses. Charismatic and quick-witted, he has friends in high places.
But when he is entrusted with a secret that threatens to wreak havoc across the country, he is drawn into a web of political intrigue at the very heart of government.
Can Hatem's fame and fortune save him from this unspeakable scandal?
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The Book of Safety
A Novel
by Yasser Abdel Hafez
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Khaled transcribes testimonies at the Palace of Confessions, a shadowy state-run agency situated in a respectable Cairo suburb. There he encounters Mustafa Ismail: a university professor turned master thief, who breaks into the homes of the great and the good and then blackmails them into silence. Mustafa has dedicated his existence to the perfection of his trade and authored The Book of Safety, the ultimate guide to successful thievery. With cool and incisive prose, Yasser Abdel Hafez follows Khaled into obsession with this mysterious book and its author.
Ebook
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Otared
A Novel
by Mohammad Rabie
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
2025: fourteen years after the failed revolution, Egypt is invaded once more. As traumatized Egyptians eke out a feral existence in Cairo's dusty downtown, former cop Ahmed Otared joins a group of fellow officers seeking Egypt's liberation through the barrel of a gun.
As Cairo becomes a foul cauldron of drugs, sex, and senseless violence, Otared finally understands his country's fate.
In this unflinching and grisly novel, Mohammad Rabie envisages a grim future for Egypt, where death is the only certainty.
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Cairo Swan Song
by Mekkawi Said
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
In the shadows of great wealth, and among Cairo's famous monuments, runs a world of street children. Mustafa, a former student radical who never really believed in the slogans, sets out to tell their story through a documentary he is making with his American girlfriend, Marcia.
Alienated from a corrupt and corrupting society, Mustafa watches as the Cairo he cherishes crumbles around him. His former leftist comrades are now all either capitalists or Islamists, while his friends and acquaintances struggle to find lovers worthy of their love and causes worthy of their sacrifice, in a country that no longer deserves their loyalty. Meanwhile, the children of the streets wait for the city to take notice.
Cairo Swan Song weaves together a patchwork narrative of overlapping lives, dreams, and realities all centering on Cairo's famous downtown neighborhood.
Ebook
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Sarab
A Novel
by Raja Alem
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
November 1979. Violence has broken out in the holiest site of Islam after a charismatic rebel and his devoted followers have announced the coming of the Mahdi and seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Among the insurgents is a young woman, Sarab, disguised as a man. As the horror and chaos of the siege reach their peak, she escapes and encounters a French officer from the opposing side. They form an unexpected bond, as hostility turns to attraction, but the violence of both of their pasts will return to haunt them.
Award-winning writer Raja Alem's extraordinary narrative stretches from Saudi Arabia's Najd desert to the heart of Paris. In her typical bold and captivating style, this most unusual of love stories unpicks faith and fanaticism, alienation and redemption, and ultimately what it means to be human.
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Fractured Destinies
A Novel
by Rabai al-Madhoun
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Palestinian-Armenian Ivana eloped with a British doctor in the 1940s, in the midst of the Nakba, and immigrated to England. Over half a century later, her daughter Julie has been tasked with her dying wish: to take her ashes back to their old home in Acre. With her husband Walid, they leave London and embark on a journey back to their country of birth. Written in four parts, each as a concerto movement, Rabai al-Madhoun's pioneering new novel explores Palestinian exile, with all its complex loyalties and identities. Broad in scope and sweeping in its history, it lays bare the tragedy of everyday Palestinian life.
Ebook
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The Final Bet
A Novel
by Abdelilah Hamdouchi
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
When young and handsome Othman married Sofia-sophisticated, French, rich, and forty years his senior-he found his ticket out of a life of desperate poverty in the slums of Casablanca.
But when Sofia is brutally murdered, the police quickly zero in on Othman as the prime suspect.
With his mistress, the love of his life, waiting in the wings he certainly has motive. But is he guilty? Or has he been framed by an overzealous, corrupt police force?
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Cigarette Number Seven
A Novel
by Donia Kamal
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
As a child, Nadia was left her with her grandparents in Egypt, while her mother sought work in the Gulf. Decades later, she looks back on her fragmented childhood from an uncertain present: it is 2011 and the streets have erupted in an unexpected revolution. Her activist father, the sole anchor in her life, encourages her to be a part of the protests and so Nadia joins the sit-in at Tahrir Square. Donia Kamal's succinct, candid prose draw us into Nadia's world: from the private to the public; from the men she has loved and lost, to her participation in the momentous events of the Egyptian revolution. Stunning in its simplicity, Cigarette Number Seven is a deeply intimate novel about family and relationships in turbulent times.
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All That I Want to Forget
A Novel
by Bothayna Al-Essa
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Fatima loves poetry and wants to study French literature-both of which are anathema to her strict and conservative much older brother, Saqr. While living under his roof, Fatima's hopes and dreams are scrutinized, mocked, and slowly crushed as she is forced into his narrow vision of the right path.
Then Fatima meets Isam, a poet like her; they email love letters to each other and meet in secret. Saqr, however, has other ideas: she is married off to Faris, a complete stranger. He is not the cruel tyrant her brother was, but still she did not choose him.
Will she escape her past to live the life of love and poetry she craves?
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The Egyptian Assassin
A Novel
by Ezzedine C. Fishere
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A lawyer-turned-terrorist is catapulted on a mission traversing Cairo, Sudan, Paris and Afghanistan in this revenge thriller deftly-written by a Middle East political insider
A lifetime ago, Fakhreddin had been an idealistic young lawyer, seeking to fight corruption from his modest quarter of Cairo. Then, a botched attempt on his life forced him to flee the country, propelling him on a wild journey that would lead to Afghanistan's jihadi training camps.
He was transformed into a trained killer, and never once lost sight of his goal: revenge. But did he lose sight of the only person that really mattered to him, his son, Omar?
At the very core of Fakhreddin's bold, nail-biting exploits are his broken family, and broken heart, and his search for redemption and a way home.
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The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor
A Novel
by Rana Haddad
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Aspiring photographer Dunya Noor discovers early on that her curious spirit, rebellious nature, and very curly hair are a recipe for disaster in 1980s Syria. And at the tender age of thirteen, she is exiled to live with her grandparents in England. Many years later in London, she meets Hilal, the son of a humble tailor from Aleppo and no match for Dunya, daughter of the great heart surgeon Joseph Noor. But, dreamy, restless Dunya falls in love with Hilal and they decide to return to Syria together, embarking on a journey that will change them both forever. Rana Haddad's vivid and satirical debut novel captures the essence of life under the Assad dictatorship, in all its rigid absurdity. With humor and an unexpected playfulness, this is a story of love and light against the forces of conservatism and oppression.
Ebook
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Velvet
by Huzama Habayeb
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Hawa is a child of the grinding hardship of a Palestinian refugee camp. She has had to survive the camp itself, as well as the humiliation and destruction of an abusive family life. But now, later in life, something most unexpected has happened: she has fallen in love.
Velvet unfolds over a day in Hawa's life, as she makes plans for a new beginning that may take her out of the camp. She sifts back through her memories of the past: the stories of her family, her childhood, and her beloved mentor, who invited her into the glamorous world of the rich women of Amman.
This is a novel of enormous power and great beauty. Rich in detail, it tells of the women of the camp, and the joy and relief that can be captured amid repression and sorrow.
Ebook
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The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets
A Novel
by Khairy Shalaby
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Ibn Shalaby, like many Egyptians, is looking for a job. Yet, unlike most of his fellow citizens, he is prone to sudden dislocations in time. Armed with his trusty briefcase and his Islamic-calendar wristwatch, he bounces uncontrollably through Egypt's rich and varied past, with occasional return visits to the 1990s.
Through his wild and whimsical adventures, he meets, befriends, and falls out with sultans, poets, and an assortment of celebrities-from Naguib Mahfouz to the founder of the city of Cairo. Khairy Shalaby's nimble storytelling brings this witty odyssey to life.
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The Men Who Swallowed the Sun
A Novel
by Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
This gritty tale of two men's ill-conceived quest for a better life via the deserts of the Middle East and the cities of Europe is pure storytelling
Two Bedouin men from Egypt's Western Desert seek to escape poverty through different routes. One-the intellectual, terminally self-doubting, and avowedly autobiographical Hamdi-gets no further than southern Libya's fly-blown oasis of Sabha, while his cousin-the dashing, irrepressible Phantom Raider-makes it to the fleshpots of Milan.
The backdrop of this darkly comic and unsentimental story of illegal immigration is a brutal Europe and Muammar Gaddafi's rickety, rhetoric-propped Great State of the Masses, where "the Leader" fantasizes of welding Libyan and Egyptian Bedouin into a new self-serving political force, the Saad-Shin.
Compelling and visceral, with a seductive, muscular irony, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is an unforgettable novel of two men and their fellow migrants and the extreme marginalization that drives them.
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A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me
A Novel
by Youssef Fadel
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A powerful and poetic masterpiece where ordinary people's dreams play out in a city plagued by government exploitation and crime
As his wife delivers their child in the next room, a man wakes from the nightmare of a teenage girl's body lying beneath his bed. In this twilight before birth, Fadel's epic novel catches us in the confusion between exaltation and despair. The girl, Farah, once dreamed of being a singer in Casablanca, a city standing in the shadow of the tallest minaret in the world.
Illuminating the aspirations of those just struggling to make a living, A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me is a tour-de-force, a novel of power plays and petty jealousies, deceit and corruption, love and loss, written with Fadel's masterful, narrative control and searing, historical insight.
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The Woman from Tantoura
A Novel from Palestine
by Radwa Ashour
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Ruqayya was only thirteen when the Nakba came to her village in Palestine in 1948. The massacre in Tantoura drove her from her home and from everything she had ever known. She had not left her village before, but she would never return. Now an old woman, Ruqayya looks back on a long life in exile, one that has taken her to Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf, and given her children and grandchildren. Through her depth of experience and her indomitable spirit, we live her love of her land, her family, and her people, and we feel the repeated pain of loss and of diaspora.
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The Magnificent Conman of Cairo
A Novel
by Adel Kamel
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Available in English for the first time, this rediscovered classic which Naguib Mahfouz called "exceptional," tells a story of fathers and sons, scoundrels and the innocent, set in 1930s Cairo
Khaled, the spoiled idle son of a pasha, meets Mallim, carpenter's apprentice and son of a scoundrel, when he comes to fix a broken window. In the course of his work, Mallim stumbles across a stash of money and dutifully hands it in. Khaled cooks up an overly elaborate plot to see that his dastardly father pays Mallim his due, but the plot backfires and Mallim is thrown in jail.
Khaled's guilt over Mallim's misfortune, made worse by his ridiculous attempts to defend him, result in a decisive moment: he breaks ties with his cruel and tyrannical father, seeking to leave behind the upper-class lifestyle he finds so suffocating.
They meet again years later, when Mallim has been released from prison and given up on earning an honest living. Khaled gets caught up in Mallim's latest scam and is drawn into joining his cadre of eccentrics and failed artists living in a derelict Mamluk citadel.
With a sharp satirical voice Adel Kamal's masterful novel is filled with compelling drama, vivid characters, and subtle humor.
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Whitefly
A Novel
by Abdelilah Hamdouchi
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
When a fourth corpse in three days washes up in Tangier with a bullet in the chest, Detective Laafrit knows this isn't just another illegal immigrant who didn't make it to the Spanish coast.
The traffickers. The drug dealers. The smugglers. They know what it takes to get a gun into Morocco, and so does Laafrit. As his team hunts for the gun, Laafrit follows a hunch and reveals an international conspiracy to unlock the case.
Whitefly is a fast-paced crime thriller from the Arab west.
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The Disappearance of Mr. Nobody
A Novel
by Ahmed Taibaoui
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A "spare, well-crafted and compelling" (Samah Selim) novel in which a man in Algiers disappears without trace and the detective in search of him finds more than he expected, winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature
In Rouiba, a nondescript suburb of Algiers, an unnamed man with a troubled past escapes his everyday life to find himself caring for an old man with dementia. When the man dies, the carer disappears into thin air. A police detective is assigned to investigate the circumstances of the old man's demise and to track down the caretaker, only to find that the unnamed man cannot be identified-that there is no trace of Mr. Nobody. The officer's search leads him to those whose paths once crossed Mr. Nobody's. In each of them he finds a reflection of the man he is looking for.
A raw, lyrical portrait of life on the margins in contemporary Algiers, this haunting noir captures an underworld of police informers, shady imams, bootleg beer traders, and grave robbers, and reverberates with echoes of Algeria's violent past.
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In the Spider's Room
A Novel
by Muhammad Abdelnabi
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Hani was out for an evening stroll near Cairo's Tahrir Square when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. An informant had identified him, and he was thrown into the back of a police truck. There began a seven-month nightmare as he was swept up, along with fifty other men, in the infamous Queen Boat affair that targeted Egypt's gay community.
Finally free, but traumatized into speechlessness, Hani writes down the events of his life-his first sexual desires, his relationship with his mother, his marriage of convenience, and his passion for Abdel Aziz, the only man he ever truly loved.
In the Spider's Room is a sensitive and courageous account of life as a gay man in Egypt.
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My First and Only Love
A Novel
by Sahar Khalifeh
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A deeply poetic account of love and resistance through a young girl's eyes by acclaimed writer, Sahar Khalifeh, called "the Virginia Woolf of Palestinian literature" (Börsenblatt)
Nidal, after many decades of restless exile, returns to her family home in Nablus, where she had lived with her grandmother before the 1948 Nakba that scattered her family across the globe. She was a young girl when the popular resistance began and, through the bloodshed and bitter struggle, Nidal fell in love with freedom fighter Rabie. He was her first and only real love, him and all that he represented: Palestine in its youth, the resistance fighters in the hills, the nation as embodied in her family home and in the land.
Many years later, Nidal and Rabie meet, and he encourages her to read her uncle Amin's memoirs. She immerses herself in the details of her family and national past and discovers the secret history of her absent mother.
Filled with emotional urgency and political immediacy, Sahar Khalifeh spins an epic tale reaching from the final days of the British Mandate to today with clear-eyed realism and great imagination.
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A Stranger in Baghdad
A Novel
by Elizabeth Loudon
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
LONGLISTED FOR THE BRIDPORT NOVEL AWARD
In beautifully rendered prose, a mother and a daughter struggle as outsiders in Baghdad and London in this intergenerational drama set against a background of political tension and intrigue
"Who would be charmed by tales of life in the beautiful old house on the banks of the Tigris-looted now no doubt, its shutters torn and the courtyard strewn with mattresses?"
One night in 2003, Anglo-Iraqi psychiatrist Mona Haddad has a surprise visitor to her London office, an old acquaintance Duncan Claybourne. But why has he come? Will his confession finally lay bare what happened to her family before they escaped Iraq?
Their stories begin in 1937, when Mona's mother Diane, a lively Englishwoman newly married to Ibrahim, an ambitious Iraqi doctor, meets Duncan by chance. Diane is working as a nanny for the Iraqi royal family. Duncan is a young British Embassy officer in Baghdad. When the king dies in a mysterious accident, Ibrahim and his family suspect Diane of colluding with Duncan and the British.
Summoning up the vanished world of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad, Elizabeth Loudon's richly evocative story of one family calls into question British attitudes and policies in Iraq and offers up a penetrating reflection on cross-cultural marriage and the lives of women caught between different worlds.
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Granada
The Complete Trilogy
by Radwa Ashour
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A TOP 100 LITERARY WORK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (THE ARAB WRITERS UNION)
A BOOK RIOT BEST BOOK OF 2024
A multigenerational epic set at the collapse of Muslim rule in Medieval Spain, available now for the first time in a new, complete translation
It is 1492, and the keys to Granada, the last Muslim state in the Spanish Peninsula, have been handed over to the Christian king and queen: the final vestiges of this Arab kingdom in Europe are swept away.
As the triumphant new masters of Granada burn books, Abu Jaafar, a bookseller by trade, quietly moves his rich library out of town, while preparing for the marriage of his granddaughter Saleema to his apprentice Saad. The tangled lives of Abu Jaafar's family, his descendants, and his community bear witness to the vanquishing of Muslim life: confiscations, forced conversions, and expulsions.
Radwa Ashour's sweeping trilogy, set over one hundred years against the backdrop of the great historical events of sixteenth-century Europe, tells the story of those who remained in Andalusia, of the individuals who struggled to maintain faith and hope in a possible future. It narrates a community's effort to comprehend what has happened to them, of their valiant but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to resist the destruction of their identity.
Named a top literary work of the twentieth century by the Arab Writers' Union, Granada is now available in English in its entirety for the first time. All three novels-Granada, Maryama and The Departure-are brilliantly retranslated in this outstanding new paperback edition.
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The Girl with Braided Hair
A Novel
by Rasha Adly
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
The lives of two women living centuries apart are connected by an enigmatic painting in this mesmerizing debut based on historical events
Art historian, Yasmine, is restoring an unsigned portrait of a strikingly beautiful girl from the Napoleonic Era, when she discovers that the artist has embedded a lock of hair into the painting, something highly unusual. The mysterious painting came into the museum's possession without record, and Yasmine becomes consumed by the secret concealed within this captivating work.
Meanwhile, at the close of the French Campaign in Egypt, sixteen-year-old Zeinab, the daughter of a prominent sheikh, is drawn into French high society when Napoleon himself requests her presence. Enamored by the foreign customs of the Europeans, she finds herself on a dangerous path, one that may ostracize her from her family and culture.
Seamlessly merging fiction with history, art, and politics, modern day Cairo with its opulent past, this compelling story of two women caught between worlds and entangled in matters of the heart launches an entrancing new literary voice.
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The Open Door
by Latifa Al-Zayyat
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
The Open Door is a landmark of women's writing in Arabic. Published in 1960, it was very bold for its time in exploring a middle-class Egyptian girl's coming of sexual and political age, in the context of the Egyptian nationalist movement preceding the 1952 revolution. The novel traces the pressures on young women and young men of that time and class as they seek to free themselves of family control and social expectations. Young Layla and her brother become involved in the student activism of the 1940s and early 1950s and in the popular resistance to continued imperialist rule; the story culminates in the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Gamal Abd al-Nasser's nationalization of the Canal led to a British, French, and Israeli invasion. Not only daring in her themes, Latifa al-Zayyat was also bold in her use of colloquial Arabic, and the novel contains some of the liveliest dialogue in modern Arabic literature.
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No Knives in the Kitchens of This City
A Novel
by Khaled Khalifa
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, one Syrian family descends into tragedy and ruin.
Irrepressible Sawsan flirts with militias, the ruling party, and finally religion, seeking but never finding salvation. She and her siblings and mother are slowly choked in violence and decay, as their lives are plundered by a brutal regime.
Set between the 1960s and 2000s, No Knives in the Kitchens of this City unravels the systems of fear and control under Assad. With eloquence and startling honesty, it speaks of the persecution of a whole society.
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Gold Dust
by Ibrahim Al-Koni
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Rejected by his tribe and hunted by the kin of the man he killed, Ukhayyad and his thoroughbred camel flee across the desolate Tuareg deserts of the Sahara. Between bloody wars against the Italians in the north and famine raging in the south, Ukhayyad rides for the remote rock caves of Jebel Hasawna. There, he says farewell to the mount who has been his companion through thirst, disease, lust, and loneliness. Alone in the desert, haunted by the prophetic cave paintings of ancient hunting scenes and the cries of jinn in the night, Ukhayyad awaits the arrival of his pursuers and their insatiable hunger for blood and gold. Gold Dust is a classic story of the brotherhood between man and beast, the thread of companionship that is all the difference between life and death in the desert. It is a story of the fight to endure in a world of limitless and waterless wastes, and a parable of the struggle to survive in the most dangerous landscape of all: human society.
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A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me
A Novel
by Youssef Fadel
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Hassan makes a living in his native Marrakesh as a comic writer and performer, through his satirical sketches critical of Morocco's rulers. Yet when he is suddenly conscripted into a losing war in the Sahara, and drafted to a far-flung desert outpost, it seems that all is lost.
Could his estranged father, close to power as the king's private jester, have something to do with his sudden removal from the city? And will he ever see his beloved wife Zinab again?
With flowing prose and black humor, Youssef Fadel subtly tells the story of 1980s Morocco.
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The House of the Coptic Woman
A Novel
by Ashraf El-Ashmawi
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A Notable African Book of 2023 (Brittle Paper)
Tightly plotted and taboo-breaking, this explosive story takes readers to the roots of religious strife where the smallest of sparks can start a bonfire
Nader, an idealistic public prosecutor at the outset of his career, leaves Cairo to start a new posting in rural upper Egypt. On his first night, a mysterious woman named Hoda shows up at his lodgings. She is on the run from an abusive husband and, harboring a dark secret, seeks a new start in this small village and hopes to escape her harrowing past.
Nothing is to be easy for Hoda or Nader, and the dramatic circumstances of their first meeting signal the disquiet to come. It is not long before tensions between Copts and Muslims, already on a knife-edge, spiral into a spate of unexplained killings and arson attacks. The locals blame the trouble on the supernatural, and Nader is thrown into a quagmire of sectarian conflict and superstition that no amount of formal training could have prepared him for. His investigations are thwarted at every turn, by uncooperative witnesses and an obstructive police force. As Nader and Hoda each pursue happiness and justice, their parallel journeys struggle against the forces of ignorance, poverty, hatred, and greed.
With its echoes of Tawfiq al-Hakim's Diary of a Country Prosecutor, this is a powerful and personal tale of conflict, crime, and upheaval in rural Egypt.
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The Critical Case of a Man Called K
A Novel
by Aziz Mohammad
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A sensitive and at times darkly humorous story of a young man's experience of illness, his contemplation of death, and his determination to maintain his independence through it all
Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction
After reading Kafka, K decides to write his own diary, but he is constantly frustrated by his lack of experiences: he is worn down by the drudgery of his corporate job for a faceless corporation and by his incessant family obligations.
When he receives the news that he has leukemia, he finds himself torn between a sense of devastation and a revelation that he has finally found a way out of his writing predicament.
Through Mohammed's measured but forceful writing, this compelling debut has a universality that reaches across time, place, and culture.
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The Book Smuggler
A Novel
by Omaima Al-Khamis
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A magical story of a Crusade-era bookseller who embarks on a journey through the Islamic world's great medieval cities, winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature
In the epic fashion of the great Arab explorers and travel writers of the Middle Ages, scribe and bookworm Mazid al-Hanafi narrates this journey from his remote village in the Arabian Desert. Dreaming of grand libraries, his passion for the written word draws him into a secret society of book smugglers and into the famed cultural capitals of the period-Baghdad, Jerusalem, Cairo, Granada, and Cordoba.
He discovers a dangerous new world of ideas and experiences the cultural diversity of the Islamic Golden Age, its sects, philosophical schools, wars, and ways of life.
Omaima Al-Khamis's magical storytelling and her vivid descriptions of time and place trace a route through ancient cities and cultures and immerse us in a distant era, uncovering the intellectual debates and struggles which continue to rage today.
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The Lady of Zamalek
A Novel
by Ashraf El-Ashmawi
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Spanning twentieth-century Egyptian history and opening with the true story of a prominent Cairo businessman's murder, this rags-to-riches story wondrously combines real-life events with fiction, told by a "magical storyteller"
It was in the spring of 1927 that Cairo's attention was captured by the shocking murder of prominent businessman Solomon Cicurel in his Nile-side villa in the upscale Zamalek district. It was a burglary that went wrong, and four culprits were soon arrested. Their trial was concluded swiftly, their punishments were decisive, and society breathed a sigh of relief.
In Ashraf El-Ashmawi's telling, there was a fifth accomplice, Abbas, who fled to his home in the countryside to lay low until the murder trial blew over. However, he did not escape empty-handed and kept stolen documents from Cicurel's villa, ones that he imagined would lead him to a hidden safe. Abbas hatched a plan to return to the capital, find the safe, and make his fortune. The first step was to place his sister Zeinab with Cicurel's widow, Paula.
Abbas's rags-to-riches story unfolds as a tale of modern Egypt, taking in the Second World War, the 1952 revolution and rise of Nasser, the 1967 war, and the Sadat and Mubarak eras. Spanning the 1920s to the 1990s, El-Ashmawi deftly weaves together history with fiction in this intriguing English-language debut.
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Suleiman's Ring
A Novel
by Sherif Meleka
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
An enchanted ring brings good fortune to an Egyptian oud player in this compelling novel combining elements of magical realism with political history
Can one man or a mere ring alter the events of one's life and the history of a country? Combining elements of magical realism with momentous history, Suleiman's Ring poses these questions and more in a gripping tale of friendship, identity, and the fate of a nation.
Alexandria, Egypt, on the eve of the 1952 Free Officers revolution. Dawud, a struggling musician, is summoned with his best friend Sheikh Hassanein to a meeting with Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who seeks their help as he mobilizes for the revolution. Dawud lends Nasser an enchanted silver ring for its powers to bring good luck. The revolution succeeds but Dawud soon grows estranged from Hassanein, who has joined the Muslim Brotherhood, after he suggests that Dawud leave Egypt since as a Jew he is no longer welcome. When Hassanein is arrested, however, destiny draws Dawud into a complex web of sexual intrigue and betrayal that threatens to upend his already precarious existence.
Set against the backdrop of the simmering political tensions of mid-twentieth-century Egypt and the Arab–Israeli wars, Sherif Meleka's story of fate and fortune transports us to another time and place while peeling back the curtain on events that still haunt the country to this day.
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I Do Not Sleep
A Novel
by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A story of betrayal, desire, and family drama, written by a giant of Egyptian popular fiction who shocked readers in the 1950s when this Lolita-esque novel first appeared and whose work has never before been available in English
Sixteen-year-old Nadia had been raised by her father, after her parents divorced when she was only a baby. Indulged and petulant, she remained the only female in her father's life. But when she returns from boarding school to find that he has remarried without her knowledge, she conspires to restore her rightful place, creating misery, confusion, and a flood of unexpected consequences in her wake.
Written as a letter, a confession, by now twenty-one-year old Nadia, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous's classic novel of revenge and betrayal challenges patriarchal norms with its strong female characters and brazen sexuality, and continues to speak to the complex human condition. It dives into middle-class life, and lays bare the repressed desires, seething jealousies, and complicated dramas of family.
Abdel Kouddous's masterpiece I Do Not Sleep was adapted into a classic of Egyptian cinema in 1957, and its publication for the first time in English is an international publishing event.
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Here Is a Body
A Novel
by Basma Abdel Aziz
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
The Queue, an electrifying new voice in Arab women's fiction passionately brings to life the machinations of state oppression.
Mysterious men are rounding up street children and enrolling them in a so-called "rehabilitation program," designed to indoctrinate them for the military-backed regime's imminent crackdown on its opponents. Across town, thousands of protesters encamp in a city square demanding the return of the recently deposed president.
Reminiscent of recent clashes in Egypt and reflective of political movements worldwide, where civilians face off against state power, Abdel Aziz deftly illustrates the universal human struggles between resisting and succumbing to an oppressive regime.
Here Is A Body is a courageous and powerful depiction of the state cooptation of human bodies, the dehumanization of marginalized groups, and the use of inflammatory religious rhetoric to manipulate a narrative.
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A Nose and Three Eyes
A Novel
by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
Written by iconic Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, this classic of love, desire, and family breakdown smashed through taboos when first published in Arabic and continues to captivate audiences today
It is 1950s Cairo and 16-year-old Amina is engaged to a much older man. Despite all the excitement of the wedding preparations, Amina is not looking forward to her nuptials. And it is not because of the age gap or because of the fact that she does not love, or even really know, her fiancé. No, it is because she is involved with another man.
This other man is Dr Hashim Abdel-Latif, and while he is Amina's first love, she is certainly not his. Also many years her senior, Hashim is well-known in polite circles for his adventures with women. A Nose and Three Eyes tells the story of Amina's love affair with Hashim, and that of two other young women: Nagwa and Rihab.
A Nose and Three Eyes is a story of female desire and sexual awakening, of love and infatuation, and of exploitation and despair. It quietly critiques the strictures put upon women by conservative social norms and expectations, while a subtle undercurrent of political censure was carefully aimed at the then Nasser regime. As such, it was both deeply controversial and wildly popular when first published in the 1960s. Still a household name, this novel, and its author, have stood the test of time and remain relevant and highly readable today.
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The Watermelon Boys
A Novel
by Ruqaya Izzidien
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
It is the winter of 1915 and Iraq has been engulfed by the First World War. Hungry for independence from Ottoman rule, Ahmad leaves his peaceful family life on the banks of the Tigris to join the British-led revolt. Thousands of miles away, Welsh teenager Carwyn reluctantly enlists and is sent, via Gallipoli and Egypt, to the Mesopotamia campaign.
Carwyn's and Ahmad's paths cross, and their fates are bound together. Both are forever changed, not only by their experience of war, but also by the parallel discrimination and betrayal they face.
Ruqaya Izzidien's evocative debut novel is rich with the heartbreak and passion that arise when personal loss and political zeal collide, and offers a powerful retelling of the history of British intervention in Iraq.
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Honey Hunger
A Novel
by Zahran Alqasmi
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A breathtaking novel of longing, uncertainty, and ultimately of hope, written by an International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning author and an International Booker-prize winning translator
Azzan 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 honey-colored eyes.
Across the breathtaking vistas of Oman's remote mountains and plains, Azzan's troubled past and present unfold. A disappointment to his family, he turns to drink, and ultimately discovers the healing power of his beekeeping, before an accident in which he loses all.
Zahran Alqasmi's masterful novel thrums forward with a subtle momentum. His lucid, poetic writing conveys a visceral sense of time and place, of the fragile ecologies inhabited by both bees and humans alike, in this intense and compelling novel of loss and hope.
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History of Ash
A Novel
by Khadija Marouazi
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ERBD LITERATURE PRIZE 2024
A BEST NEW BOOK OF 2023 (THE NEW ARAB)
A NOTABLE AFRICAN BOOK OF 2023 (BRITTLE PAPER)
An unforgettable and eviscerating novel of human frailty, brutality, and resistance as told through the first-person prison narratives of a man and a woman
History of Ash is a fictional prison account narrated by Mouline and Leila, who have been imprisoned for their political activities during the so-called Lead Years of the 1970s and 1980s in Morocco, a period that was characterized by heavy state repression.
Moving between past and present, between experiences lived inside the prison cell and outside it, in the torture chamber and the judicial system, and the challenges they faced upon their release, Mouline and Leila describe their strategies for survival and resistance in lucid, often searing detail, and reassess their political engagements and the movements in which they are involved.
Written with compassion and insight, History of Ash speaks to human brutality, resilience, and the power of the human spirit. It succeeds in both documenting the prison experience and humanizing it, while ultimately holding out the promise of redemption through a new generation.
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The Jinn Daughter
A Novel
by Rania Hanna
Part of the Hoopoe Fiction series
A stunning debut novel and an impressive feat of storytelling that pulls together mythology, magic, and ancient legend in the gripping story of a mother's struggle to save her only daughter
Nadine is a jinn tasked with one job: telling the stories of the dead. She rises every morning to gather pomegranate seeds-the souls of the dead-that have fallen during the night. With her daughter Layala at her side, she eats the seeds and tells their stories. Only then can the departed pass through the final gate of death.
But when the seeds stop falling, Nadine knows something is terribly wrong. All her worst fears are confirmed when she is visited by Kamuna, Death herself and ruler of the underworld, who reveals her desire for someone to replace her: it is Layala she wants.
Nadine will do whatever it takes to keep her daughter safe, but Kamuna has little patience and a ruthless drive to get what she has come for. Layala's fate, meanwhile, hangs in the balance.
Rooted in Middle Eastern mythology, Rania Hanna deftly weaves subtle, yet breathtaking, magic through this vivid and compelling story that has at its heart the universal human desire to, somehow, outmaneuver death.