The Map of Love
by Ahdaf Soueif

A Finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize, “The Map of Love” spans three continents and the course of a century as it traces a transcendent cross-cultural love affair back to its dramatic precursor generations earlier.

Gate of the Sun
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.

Yunes, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. Keeping vigil at the old man’s bedside is his spiritual son, Khalil, who nurses Yunes, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, Khalil relates the story of Palestinian exile while also recalling Yunes’s own extraordinary life and his love for his wife, whom he meets secretly over the years at Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun.

Naguib Mahfouz
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1988
Mahfouz is the author of no fewer than thirty novels, more than a hundred short stories, and more than two hundred articles.

Half of his novels have been made into films which have circulated throughout the Arabic-speaking world. In Egypt, each new publication is regarded as a major cultural event and his name is inevitably among the first mentioned in any literary discussion from Gibraltar to the Gulf.

Hanan Al-Shaykh is a Lebanese novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and playwright. Hanan has published numerous novels and short stories and is considered a major force in Arabic Literature. She is one of the leading contemporary women writers in the Arab world and has established critical success of her books in the United States and E urope. Her novels, which are all written in Arabic, have been translated into English, French, Dutch, German, Danish, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Polish.

Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese journalist and novelist, whose native language was Arabic but who writes in French. Most of Maalouf’s books have a historical setting, and like Umberto Eco, Orhan Pamuk, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Maalouf mixes fascinating historical facts with fantasy and philosophical ideas.

In an interview Maalouf has said that his role as a writer is to create “positive myths”. Maalouf’s works, written with the skill of a master storyteller, offer a sensitive view of the values and attitudes of different cultures in the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean world.

Granada – a Novel
by Radwa Ashour

Author Radwa Ashour is an Egyptian novelist. Translator William Granara is professor of Arabic at Harvard University.

A powerful novel of life in the mixed culture that existed in Southern Spain before the expulsion of the Arabs and Jews.

Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems by Fatema Mernissi

Throughout my childhood, my grandmother Yasmina, who wa silliterate and grew up in a harem, repeated that to travel is the best way to learn and empower yourself. “When a woman decides to use her wings, she takes big risks,” she would tell me, but she was convinced that if you didn’t use them, it hurt…

So recalls Fatema Mernissi at the outset of her mesmerizing new book. Of all the lessons she learned from her grandmother —whose home was, after all, a type of prison—the most central was that the opportunity to cross boundaries was a sacred priviledge.

The Dark Side of Love
Rafik Schami’s 900-page masterpiece, hot off the press 2009
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

A dead man hangs from the portal of St Paul’s Chapel in Damascus. He was a Muslim officer—and he was murdered. But when Detective Barudi sets out to interrogate the man’s mysterious widow, the Secret Service takes the case away from him. Barudi continues to investigate clandestinely and discovers the murderer’s motive: it is a blood feud between the Mushtak and Shahin clans, reaching back to the beginnings of the 20th century. And, linked to it, a love story that can have no happy ending, for reconciliation has no place within the old tribal structures.

Rafik Schami’s dazzling novel spans a century of Syrian history in which politics and religions continue to torment an entire people. Simultaneously, his poetic stories from three generations tell of the courage of lovers who risk death sooner than deny their passions. He has also written a heartfelt tribute to his hometown Damascus and a great and moving hymn to the power of love.

Papa Sartre: A Modern Arabic Novel
An ironic view of Iraqi intellectual life in the sixties

Description:
After a failed study mission in France, Abd al-Rahman returns home to Iraq to launch an existentialist movement akin to that of his hero. Convinced that it falls upon him to introduce his country’s intellectuals to Sartre’s thought, he feels especially qualified by his physical resemblance to the philosopher (except for the crossed eyes) and by his marriage to Germaine, who he claims is the great man’s cousin. Meanwhile, his wealth and family prestige guarantee him an idle life spent in drinking, debauchery, and frequenting a well-known nightclub.

But is his suicide an act of philosophical despair, or a reaction to his friend’s affair with Germaine? A biographer chosen by his presumed friends narrates the story of a somewhat bewildered young man who—like other members of his generation—was searching for a meaning to his life.

This parody of the abuses and extravagances of pseudo- philosophers in the Baghdad of the sixties throws into relief the Iraqi intellectual and cultural life of the time and the reversal of fortune of some of Iraq’s wealthy and powerful families.

A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories by Alia Malek (Paperback || Kindle)

Synopsis

Among the surfeit of narratives about Arabs that have been published in recent years, surprisingly little has been reported on Arabs in America — an increasingly relevant issue. This book is the most powerful approach imaginable: it is the story of the last forty-plus years of American history, told through the eyes of Arab Americans.

It begins in 1963, before major federal legislative changes seismically transformed the course of American immigration forever. Each chapter describes an event in U.S. history — which may already be familiar to us — and invites us to live that moment in time in the skin of one Arab American. The chapters follow a timeline from 1963 to the present, and the characters live in every corner of this country.