Yahya Yakhlif

Translated by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley

A Lake Beyond the Wind is a novel about the most catastrophic year in Palestinian history, a time marked by violent clashes between Zionist forces and the volunteers of the Arab Liberation Army. Yakhlif tenderly gathers all the town folk, the soldiers of the beleaguered army, the animals of the natural world into his tale, which makes it all the more powerful a lament for a world that is no more.

Wajdi Al-Ahdal

Translated by William Maynard Hutchins

This short novel has echoes of both the Sherlock Holmes stories and The Catcher in the Rye as, in addition to the mystery and a murder, the novel contains candid discussions of coming of age in a land of sexual repression. Wajdi al-Ahdal is a satirical author with a fresh and provocative voice and an excellent eye for the telling details of his world.

Bensalem Himmich

Translated by Roger Allen

This novel is a vertiginous exploration of one of Islam’s most radical thinkers, the Sufi philosopher Ibn Sab’in. Born in Spain, he was forced to immigrate to Africa because of his controversial views. Later expelled from Egypt, Ibn Sab’in made his way to Mecca, where he spent his final years.

Ghassan Kanafani

Translated by May Jayyusi and Jermey Reed

All That's Left to You presents the vivid story of twenty-four hours in the real and remembered lives of a brother and sister living in Gaza and separated from their family. The desert and time emerge as characters as Kanafani speaks through the desert, the brother, and the sister to build the powerful rhythm of the narrative. 

Youssef Ziedan

Translated by Jonathan Wright

Azazeel takes place in the fifth century AD between Upper Egypt, Alexandria and northern Syria, following the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire, and the ensuing internal sectarian conflict between the church fathers on the one hand, and the new believers on the other hand, declining paganism. 

Moussa Ould Ebnou

Translated by Marybeth Timmermann

While studying the land of Barzakh in the Sahara, members of the Institute for the Archeology of Human Thought unearth the bones of Gara, a young man, whose Myelin will unravel the secrets of his ancient consciousness. A foreigner in his own land, Gara, in search of a better humanity, has traveled through three eras, from the 11th-century deserts of Mauritania to the dystopic future, inadvertently sowing the seeds of his own destruction.

Mahmoud Saeed

Translated by Kay Heikkinen

In Ben Barka Lane we see the Morocco of the late 1960s through the eyes of a young political exile from Iraq—its beauty and misery, its unforgettable people.

Hamdy el-Gazzar 

Translated by Humphrey Davies

In a world of superficiality, materialism, violence, and sexual hysteria seen through the unforgiving lens of his camera, Nasir’s life is in limbo. A yearning for escape and a fear of loneliness propel him into a relationship in which he is at once enraptured and non-committal. The resolution of this volatile mix lies in a violent confrontation between repulsion and desire. 

Naguib Mahfouz

Translated by Peter Theroux

The history of a Cairo alley through several generations. Successive heroes struggle to restore the rights of the people to the trust fund set up by their ancestor Gebelaawi, usurped by embezzlers and tyrants. Mahfouz creates in all its detail a world on the frontier between the real and the imaginary.

Mohamed El-Bisatie

Translated by Hala El-Bisatie

In this lyrical novel, an accomplished experiment in the poetics of space, the stories of these various figures converge on the mercurial presence of the lake, which in the end proves the narrative's true hero. 

Abdulrahman Munif

Translated by Peter Theroux

Set in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom in the 1930s, this remarkable novel tells the story of the disruption and diaspora of a poor oasis community following the discovery of oil there. The meeting of the Arabs and the Americans who, in essence, colonize the remote region is a cultural confrontation in which religion, history, superstition, and mutual incomprehension all play a part.

Note: only the first three parts of the quintet have been translated.

Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad

Translated by Leslie McLoughlin

The novel was Awwad's second, written thirty years after his first. It was originally written in 1969 in Japan while Awwad was on diplomatic duty. It evokes a Beirut of night bars, student life, sectarian and class divisions, sketching out the first lines of what would later be called the literature of war.

Idris Ali

Translated by Peter Theroux

In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians reached their zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as "the bowman of the glance".

Mohamed Choukri

Translated by Paul Bowles

Mohamed Choukri is one of North Africa's most controversial and widely read authors. At the age of twenty he decided to learn to read and write classical Arabic. He went on to become a teacher and writer, finally being awarded the chair of Arabic Literature at Ibn Batuta College in Tangier.

The book itself was banned in Arab countries for its sexual explicitness. Dar al-Saqi was the first publishing house to publish it in Arabic in 1982, thirty years after it was written, though many translations came out before the Arabic version.

Hanna Minah

Translated by Olive Kenny and Lorne Kenny

Fragments of Memory is an autobiographical novel about the life of a boy born to a poor family in northern Syria. Mina sets these personal events against a richly detailed description of events in the history of early 20th century Syria, as the silkworm industry gave way to modern foreign technology.

Ahmed Saadawi

Translated by Jonathan Wright

The novel took Saadawi four years to write. Saadawi's personal experience informed the creation of the novel: during the civil war, he was working as a journalist in Baghdad; at a morgue, he witnessed how a young man wished to find the corpse of his brother who had been killed by a bomb, but was told to simply take any body parts he could find and make a body.

Elias Khoury

Translated by Humphrey Davies

Drawing on the stories he gathered from refugee camps over the course of many years, Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the Sun has been called the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga.

Ibrahim Nasrallah

Translated by Nancy Roberts

Twin sisters Randa and Lamis live under the brutal occupation of the Gaza Strip. As neighbors, friends, and strangers are killed, one after another, their identities are blurred by death that strikes so randomly and without warning. Yet just as this terrible cycle continues, so too does the cycle of life.

Radwa Ashour

Translated by Kay Heikkinen

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.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Jameel Farran, a Christian Arab, is forced to flee his destroyed Jerusalem in 1948. Teaching at Baghdad University, he falls in love with a beautiful Muslim girl, Sulafa, but their turbulent affair meets almost insurmountable obstacles of tradition and circumstance. This is a story of multiple conflicts between Arab and Jewish, desert and city, dictatorship and futile liberal effort, Eastern tradition and Western innovation. Jabra's Baghdad is a city filled with strife, squalor, and frustration; his picture of the brothels, the streets, the drawing rooms, and the lecture halls is a rich and powerful one, realistic and profoundly disturbing.

Mourid Barghouti

Translated by Ahdaf Soueif

In 1966 Mourid Barghouti went to Cairo, Egypt for higher studies. In 1967, after the Six-Day War, when he came back to Palestine after completing his studies, he was barred to enter the country. Like many others he started living abroad. Thirty years later, after continuous struggle, he was allowed to enter Ramallah, his own hometown, where he was born and had grown up.

Mourid Barghouti

Translated by Humphrey Davies

The sequel to the classic memoir I Saw Ramallah, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family.

Sinan Antoon

Translated by Rebecca C. Johnson and Sinan Antoon

An inventory of the General Security headquarters in central Baghdad reveals an obscure manuscript. Written by a young man in detention, the prose moves from prison life, to adolescent memories, to frightening hallucinations, and what emerges is a portrait of life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Khaled Khalifa

Translated by Leri Price

This novel breaks onto an era in the history of Syria as it raises questions about the conflict between both the fundamentals and authorities. Including the end and the beginning of the seventies and the eighties of the last century as well as it was a culture of hatred almost wiped out everything. In addition, the (In Praise of Hatred) leads readers from Aleppo, women and their secret lives to Afghanistan and passing by Riyadh, Aden, London and many other places.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Translated by Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar

Walid Masoud disappears. A Palestinian intellectual, he has been living in Baghdad since the first Israeli War of 1948. As a member of an organization engaged in the armed struggle against Israel, suspicion arises that he has gone underground as part of a political movement. Masoud leaves behind a lengthy but disconnected tape recording of garbled utterances through which Jabra Ibrahim Jabra artfully crafts the basis for the narration. He transforms the transcription of the tape by each of Masoud’s comrades into a study of character. Through a series of monologues, each becomes a narrator of his own experience.

Bahaa Taher

Translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab

In Love in Exile Bahaa Taher presents multilayered variations on the themes of exile, disillusionment, failed dreams, and the redemptive power of love. Unwilling to recant his Nasserist beliefs, the unnamed narrator is an Egyptian journalist in a self-imposed exile in Europe after conflict with the management of his newspaper and a divorce from his wife. 

Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Translated by Baria Ahmar Sreih

This prize-winning novel, the first to be written by an Algerian woman in Arabic, is concerned with Algeria's struggle against foreign domination as well as its post-independence struggle with itself and the fate of revolutionary ideals in a post-revolutionary society.

Ghassan Kanafani

Translated by Hilary Kilpatrick

Men in the Sun follows three Palestinian refugees seeking to travel from the refugee camps in Iraq, where they cannot find work, to Kuwait where they hope to find work as laborers in the oil boom.

Adania Shibli

Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

Ibrahim Abdelmajid

Translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab

This sweeping novel depicts the intertwined lives of an assortment of Egyptians—Muslims and Copts, northerners and southerners, men and women—as they begin to settle in Egypt’s great second city, and explores how the Second World War, starting in supposedly faraway Europe, comes crashing down on them, affecting their lives in fateful ways.

Ghassan Kanafani

Translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley

Depicting Israeli activity in formerly British-controlled Mandatory Palestine during and after the 1948 Battle of Haifa, the novella is a reflection of Kanafani's personal experience but also illustrates the Palestinian experience more broadly. Scholars note that Kanafani successfully weds literary technique and political practice, as his fictional characters reflect the Palestinian condition.

Ibrahim Nasrallah

Translated by May Jayyusi and Jermey Reed

Prairies of Fever is one of the foremost modernist novels of our time. A negation of chronology and sequence, a cohesve relationship between form and content, and a temporal parallelism of events, memories and dreams, give the novel a unique tenor. The central character, Muhammad Hammad, is a young teacher hired, like hundreds of others from all over the Arab world, to teach in a remote part of the Arabian peninsula. 

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Translated by Issa J. Boullata

This book continues the personal story of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920–1994) that began with The First Well; a Bethlehem Boyhood. 

Edwar al-Kharrat

Translated by Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden

Rama and the Dragon, a multi-layered novel about the depths of human experience and the struggle between polarities, on the surface 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. 

Tawfiq Al-Hakim

Translated by William Maynard Hutchins

The story of a patriotic young Egyptian and his extended family, ending with events surrounding the 1919 revolution for al-Hakim, a literal awakening of the Egyptian spirit Return of the Spirit with its strong expression of nationalist solidarity has particular resonance now. 

Hassan Nasr

Translated by William Maynard Hutchins

Return to Dar al-Basha by the contemporary Tunisian author Hassan Nasr depicts the childhood of Murtada al-Shamikh and his return forty years later to his home in the medina or old city of Tunis.

Tayeb Salih

Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. 

Sabri Moussa

Translated by Mona N. Mikhail

Set in the harsh desert of eastern Egypt, Seeds of Corruption is the tale of a Ulysses-like hero in search of himself and his ultimate salvation. Seeds of Corruption eloquently portrays the corruption of the Egyptian monarchy and the aristocracy before 1952 as aided by foreign influence. 

Bahaa Taher

Translated by Humphrey Davies

When Mahmoud, a disgraced Egyptian officer, is posted to the remote desert town of Siwa, his Irish wife insists on accompanying him, to pursue the secrets of Alexander the Great. Neither is prepared for the stultifying heat, the hostility of the townspeople, or the astonishing and disturbing events that befall them in the dreamlike other-worldliness of the Sunset Oasis.

Habib Abdulrab Sarori

Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

Set against the backdrop of Yemeni history, The novel traces one man’s lifelong search for love and his own political ideology.

Mohammed Achaari

Translated by Aida Bamia

The work explores themes of alienation, memory, extremism, and the boundaries between life and death through the transformations of three generations of the Moroccan family of the Fersiwi family.

Sinan Antoon

Translated by Maia Tabet

Set over a single day, The Baghdad Eucharist is an intimate story of love, memory, and anguish in one Christian family.

Saud Alsanousi

Translated by Jonathan Wright

Daring and bold, The Bamboo Stalk takes an unflinching look at the universal struggles of identity, race, and class as they intersect between two disparate societies: Kuwait and the Philippines.

Sinan Antoon

Translated by Jonathan Wright

The book of Collateral Damage is a haunting and singular novel exploring memory.  A postmodern narrative about the act of writing and preserving memory set in a postwar Iraq, told through fractured, emotionally devastating manuscripts.

Nameer Al-Baghdadi, the narrator, is a writer from Iraq who’d moved to the United States to study, but has been called back home posterior to the destruction wrought about by the US invasion of Iraq, with a mission: to record and catalog the devastation. Through his correspondence and friendship with a local bookseller Wahdood, the sheer weight of shared trauma and history, as well as his own past, rises to the surface.

The novel often shifts registers between narration about Al-Baghdadi’s life in the US and his obsessive collecting of records, correspondence written by al-Baghdadi and Wahdood, as well as manuscripts including a long narrative work by Wahdood which often dips into magical realism and surrealism.

“This is my memory with all its treasures, and with all the destruction in it, laid out before you. Take what you want.”

Blurb contributed by Whisper

Ibtisam Azem

Translated by Sinan Antoon

 It follows the stories of Alaa Assaf, a Palestinian man living in Jaffa in Tel Aviv, and Ariel Levy, his Israeli neighbor and friend, who finds and reads Alaa's diary after all Palestinian Arabs spontaneously vanish from Israel.

Naguib Mahfouz

Translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny and Angele Botros Samaan

Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt, tells the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain's occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Taha Hussein

Translated by A. B. as-Safi

A unique work of fiction in modern Arabic literature. It is a romantic story about the triumph of love over revenge. It describes the social taboos of the time and how one girl eventually overcomes them. Highly poetic style with deep insight into the human heart.

Sinan Antoon

Translated by Sinan Antoon

Through the struggles of a single desperate family, Sinan Antoon’s novel shows us the heart of Iraq’s complex and violent recent history. Descending into the underworld where the borders between life and death are blurred and where there is no refuge from unending nightmares, Antoon limns a world of great sorrows, a world where the winds wail.

Raja Alem

Translated by Katharine Halls and Adam Talib

Gripping, nuanced, and labyrinthine as the alleys of Mecca itself, this powerful and disturbing work of fiction masterfully reveals a city and a civilization in all its contradictions, at once beholden to brutal customs and uneasily coming to terms with new traditions. Raja Alem's novel is a virtuosic work of literature.

Tahir Wattar

Translated by William Granara

Shaykh Abdelmajid Boularwah embarks upon a journey from Algiers to Constantine in search of lost relatives who might help him defraud the new socialist government in its attempt to implement land reform. Written in the early 1970s, Wattar’s Earthquake is an ominous message against the evils of intolerance, ignorance, and extremism, told in a language that resonates loudly, presciently foretelling the dreadful events which would later besiege Algeria.

Mohamed Zafzaf

Translated by Mbarek Sryfi and Roger Allen

In The Elusive Fox, a young teacher visits the coastal city of Essaouira in the 1960s. There he meets a group of European bohemians and local Moroccans and is exposed to the grittier side of society. The Elusive Fox is a portrait of a city during a time of fluid cultural and political mores in Morocco.

Ibrahim al-Koni

Translated by William Maynard Hutchins

In The Fetishists , Al-Koni explores what happens when a writer asks the novel to speak of and for the Sahara, when rival cultures clash, and when communities seek to build a utopia on Earth as individuals struggle between a desire for material well-being (represented by gold dust) and a need for spiritual meaning.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Translated by Issa J. Boullata

Jabra, a prominent Arabic author who died in Iraq in 1994, recaptures his youth in British-mandated Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

Dima Wannous

Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

The Frightened Ones is a boundary-blurring, radical examination of the effects of oppression on one's sense of identity, the effects of collective trauma, and a moving window into life inside Assad's Syria.

Mohammed Berrada

Translated by Issa J. Boullata

On the surface of this novel, various members of a Moroccan family recount their versions of the family's experiences under the French Protectorate and since Independence. On a deeper level, the book deals with human memory and how it forms one's experience of the world.

Ibrahim Aslan

Translated by Elliott Colla

The novel takes place in the Imbaba district of Cairo, specifically in the Kit Kat area. It revolves around an alienated world whose heroes change, each suffering from their own concerns and alienation. Over time, we realize that the real hero of the novel is the neighborhood.

Zayd Mutee' Dammaj

Translated by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley

Set in the pre-revolution Yemen of the Imams, this novel depicts the experiences of a young boy who, having been taken hostage, in line with the Imam's general practice, as a pledge for his father's political obedience, is sent to serve as a young male attendant in the palace of the city governor.

The growth of the boy's awareness, political, social and personal, is movingly portrayed against a background of bygone times whose decadence and injustice are presented with vivid satiric force.

Shukri al-Mabkhout

Translated by Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza

At his father's funeral, to the great consternation of all present, Abdel Nasser beats the imam who is celebrating the funeral rite. The narrator, a childhood friend of the protagonist, retraces the story of "the Italian" from his days as a free and rebellious adolescent spirit to the leader of a student movement and then affirmed journalist.

Rabai Al-Madhoun

Translated by Elliott Colla

The Lady from Tel Aviv explores the contradictory feelings of a Palestinian writer, an Israeli actress and the son of well known Arab leader, through a controversial relationship between the three of them, and focuses on their efforts to overcome their fears and hostility. 

Khairy Shalaby

Translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab

A young man's dreams for a better future as a student in the Teachers' Institute are shattered after he assaults one of his instructors for discriminating against him. 

From then on, he begins his descent into the underworld.

Hammour Ziada

Translated by Jonathan Wright

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.

Fuad al-Takarli

Translated 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 exquisite 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.

Salwa Bakr

Translated by Nancy Roberts

Hailed as a groundbreaking treatment of otherwise neglected aspects of medieval history, The Man from Bashmour is an exploration of the Egyptian character past and present, and offers insights into Egyptian thought on everything from love, philosophy, and religion to life and death.

Rabee Jaber

Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Rabee Jaber writes of a haunted Beirut. A Beirut split in two.

In a Lebanon immediately following the assasination of its prime minister in the year 2005, Jaber writes, in haunting prose, an exploration of both the world of the living and the world of the dead, through the dual perspective of Saman Yarid, a mundane architect, as well as his sister Josephine, who has been missing since 1983, the height of civil war in Lebanon. In Jaber’s rendering of Beirut, no answers come simple, and the contradictions and unresolved histories lead to infinitely more questions than answers.

“In Greek mythology there's a river that separates the land of the dead from that of the living. I didn't cross any rivers. There was no boat to ferry me from one bank to the other. But everyone has their river. Mine was the demarcation line between East and West Beirut.”

Blurb contributed by Whisper

Ismail Fahd Ismail

Translated by Sophia Vasalou

As the war between Iran and Iraq gathers steam in 1980, military orders arrive at the village of Sabiliyat requesting the immediate evacuation of all civilians. 

Old Um Qasem and her family pack up their belongings, round up their donkeys, and begin the journey north to find temporary refuge in Najaf. 

Latifa Al Zayyat

Translated by Marilyn Booth

A bold exploration of 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. 

Emile Habiby

Translated by Salma K Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick

The novel's name comes from merging the Arabic words for pessimist (al-mutasha'im المتشائم) and optimist (al-mutafa'il المتفائل), to describe the narrator Saeed's unique way of viewing the world. Saeed, the novel's narrator, frequently recounts tragic events related to his family and the plight of Palestinians, but he adds in comic flourishes to highlight his "optimistic" side.

Abdelhakim Kassem

Translated by Joseph Norment Bell

A richly detailed picture of Egyptian village life. Narrator Abdel-Aziz chronicles the (seven) stages of a pilgrimage to a religious shrine, occupying a different successive stage of his own life in each installment.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Translated by Adnan Haydar and Roger Allen

Jabra's novel is a masterful exploration of the post-1948 Arab world, with its frustrations, yearnings for homeland, and struggle for survival. As his characters interact on a ship sailing from Beirut to Europe, Jabra exposes them to the elements of spiritual and physical displacement. Some survive; others do not.

Mostafa Khalifa

Translated by Paul Starkey

This story of a Syrian political prisoner of conscience—an atheist mistaken for a radical Islamist—who was locked up for 13 years without trial in one of the most notorious prisons in the Middle East.

Yusuf Idris

Translated by Kristin Peterson-Ishaq

The Sinners focuses on the aftermath of an infanticide. An intense desire to bring the killer to justice arouses the local peasants, and gives them the excuse to pry into the lives of the entire community. The Sinners is an evocative account of life in pre-revolutionary Egypt, taking a hard look at the social mores and taboos of peasant society.

Hoda Barakat

Translated by Sophie Bennett

The Stone of Laughter is a virile novel which brings forth the contradictory history of a city under fire through the life and dilemmas of a gay man. It is a bold and radical novel, full of black humor and cynical observations about life in war-torn Beirut. It was hailed by critics throughout the Arab world as the best novel set against the background of the Lebanese civil war.

Hanan Al-Shaykh

Translated by Peter Ford

Banned in several Middle Eastern countries since its original publication, The Story of Zahra is an intoxicating, provocative, rich tale, of a young woman’s coming of age, against a backdrop of war-torn Beirut, that is mesmerizing in its frank sexuality.

Yahya Al-Sinwar

Translated by TASQ Company

The Thorn and the Carnation is a novel penned by Yahya Al-Sinwar throughout his lengthy incarceration in Israeli prisons that offers a profound window into the resilience and the ethos of a man who played a pivotal role in shaping the discourse of resistance within the Palestinian context. 

Gaza; in the words of a martyr who died in arms in 2024, fighting a tyrannical, bloodthirsty, depraved, inhuman entity; that weaponizes biblical injunctions and western weapons of mass destruction to satisfy insatiable western blood lust.

Radwa Ashour

Translated by Kay Heikkinen

A rich, sweeping novel of Palestine with the Nakba at its heart.

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.

Abdo Khal

Translated by Maïa Tabet and Michael K. Scott

Throwing Sparks as Big as Castles is a shocking and satirical novel exploring the devastating effects of limitless wealth in Saudi Arabia. Set in Jeddah, the story revolves around the secret life of the palace and is “a brilliant exploration of the relationship between the individual and the state,”

Ibrahim Nasrallah

Translated by Nancy Roberts

This gripping, comi-tragic fictional-factual saga takes place in the environs of Jerusalem, from late Ottoman times to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. With the colorful strokes of his pen, Ibrahim Nasrallah paints a vivid picture of Palestinian villagers' preoccupations and aspirations-their ties to their land, to their animals, and to one another.

Hoda Barakat

Translated by Marilyn Booth

This profound and disturbing novel by acclaimed Lebanese author Hoda Barakat tells the story of characters living on the periphery, battling with poverty, and fighting their own demons.

Sahar Khalifeh

Translated by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea

Originally published in Jerusalem, Wild Thorns was the first Arab novel to offer a glimpse of social and personal relations under Israeli occupation. Featuring unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, its deep sincerity, uncompromising honesty and rich emotional core plead elegantly for the cause of survival in the face of oppression.

Hanan Al-Shaykh

Translated by Catherine Cobham

A powerful and moving novel, by the Arab world's leading woman novelist, about four women coping with the insular, oppressive society of an unnamed desert state.

Gamal al-Ghitani

Translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab

The Egypt of the Mamluk dynasty witnessed a period of artistic ostentation and social and political upheaval, at the heart of which lay the unsolved question of the ruler's legitimacy. Now, in 1516, the Mamluk reign is coming to an end with the advance of the invading. Ottomans. The numerous narrators, among them a Venetian traveler and several native Muslims, tell the story of the rise to power of the ruthless, enigmatic, and puritanical governor of Cairo, Zayni Barakat ibn Musa, whose control of the corrupt city is effected only through a complicated network of spies and informers.