Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> World Literature - Middle East - Egypt & North Africa

Set in the late nineteenth century on a mythical island off the coast of Yemen, Radwa Ashour's Siraaj: An Arab Tale tells the poignant story of a mother and son as they are drawn inextricably into a revolt against their island's despotic sultan.

Amina, a baker in the sultan's palace, anxiously awaits her son's return from a long voyage at sea, fearful that the sea has claimed Said just as it did his father and grandfather. Said, left behind in Alexandria by his ship as the British navy begins an attack on the city, slowly begins to make his way home, witnessing British...

Winner, National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association, 2015

Upon the death of their leader, a group of Tuareg, a nomadic Berber community whose traditional homeland is the Sahara Desert, turns to the heir dictated by tribal custom; however, he is a poet reluctant to don the mantle of leadership. Forced by tribal elders to abandon not only his poetry but his love, who is also a poet, he reluctantly serves as leader. Whether by human design or the meddling of the Spirit World, his death inspires his tribe to settle down permanently, abandoning not only...

The Scarecrow is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni's Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community's leader at the end of the previous novel, The Puppet. They punished him for opposing the use of gold in business transactions--a symptom of a critical break with their nomadic past--and now they must search for a leader who shares their fetishistic love of gold. A desert retreat inspires the group...