AUC Press recently released the English translation of Radwa Ashour’s Al-Tantoureya, or The Woman from Tantoura, trans. Kay Heikkinen. Meanwhile, next month, BQFP will publish Ashour’s Blue Lorries, trans. Barbara Romaine:
The former (The Woman from Tantoura) tells the story of Rouqaya, a Palestinian woman who has been pushed to write the story of her life — from pre-1948 Palestine through her flight from home, to Beirut’s long civil war, to Abu Dhabi, to a stay in Alexandria, back to Lebanon — by her middle son. Indeed, a large part of the novel’s charm is the relationship between the author and her three very different sons.
Read an excerpt here. (You’ll have to find the little image that says “Google preview”. Then click it.)
The cover of The Woman from Tantoura.
The latter (Blue Lorries) tells about what it was like to choose the activist’s life in Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century, a theme Ashour also explored in her partly autobiographical Spectres, trans. Barbara Romaine.
When Youssef Rakha’s two novels — Sultan’s Seal and Crocodiles — come out from Interlink and Seven Stories this fall, the two presses will work on joint promotions. It would be nice to see AUCP and BQFP do the same.
