Forthcoming October 2024: Fiction from Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, and More
This list is incomplete and limited to what we’ve been told about or discovered; if your book should be here, please let us know in the comments or at info@arablit.org.
No One Knows Their Blood Type, by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated by Hazem Jamjoum (Cleveland State University Poetry Center: October 1, 2024)
From the publisher:
No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths―of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery about her blood type. Hers could not have been inherited from her father―the father she sometimes longed for, but always despised. This extraordinary novel of Palestine centers its narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day and the colonial context of their embodied lives. With humor and exhilarating inventiveness, it asks: why aren’t questions of love, friendship, parenthood, and desire at the core of our conversations about liberty and freedom? How would this transform our ideas of resistance?
Land of Sweetheart Deals, by translated by (Dar Arab: October 7, 2024)
From the publisher:
Land of Sweetheart Deals is a tragic cautionary tale that explores a government’s manipulation of print and social media as well as the sexual exploitation and trafficking of juveniles in Yemen. The narrator of this novel presents himself as the reader’s expert guide to Yemen’s slipperiest slopes, physical and moral, and then plummets down them headfirst. This amiable narrator and protagonist, Mutahhar Fadl, is assigned by the editor of a pro-government newspaper to leave his normal beat in Sana’a and travel to Hodeida to report on the rape of a child. He soon realizes that his true mission is not to cover a trial but to cover-up the crime, because the accused rapist is a government loyalist. Mutahhar’s marriage, career, and integrity are tested when the seductive perks of his assignment tempt him to become the novel’s antihero. While he tumbles down a dark rabbit hole with many twists and turns, one wonders whether Mutahhar’s government handlers know him better than he knows himself.
The novel’s Arabic title Ard al-Mu’amarat al-Sa‘ida is a satirical play on the Roman designation of Southern Arabia as “Arabia Felix,” fertile or happy Arabia. The novel’s chapters, which are numbered in reverse order, appear in chronological order, day by day.
The River Knows My Name, by Mortada Gzar, translated by Luke Leafgren (Amazon Crossing: October 8, 2024)
Fifteen-year-old Charlotte is restlessly coming of age in early twentieth-century Basra, Iraq. The daughter of a Seattle doctor and missionary, Charlotte craves an adventure of her own making. Just the thought of the steppes, hills, valleys, and the winding river stirs Charlotte’s imagination and sends her compass of flight dancing.
So, preferring the wondrous unknown to solicitude, Charlotte packs up copies of her father’s Gospels and a statue of the Baby Jesus and runs away. Then, in a desperate search to find his daughter, Charlotte’s own father goes missing. With the help of two women―the mission’s Sister Baghdadli and Shathra, a guide to the lost―Charlotte embarks on a quest steeped in local lore, and as mysterious and marvelous as the river itself. In turn, Charlotte may find what’s she’s been looking for all along: the ability to stake a claim on her own identity.
In this rich and immersive novel, Mortada Gzar explores the power of belief, the drive for escape, and the exhilaration of self-discovery.
Arabian Hero: Oral Poetry and Narrative Lore from Northern Arabia, by Shāyiʿ al-Amsaḥ, edited and translated by Marcel Kurpershoek (Library of Arabic Literature: October 22, 2024)
From the publisher:
An epic hero and a poet, the semi-legendary Shāyiʿ al-Amsaḥ was a prominent ancestor of the Shammar tribal confederation that stretches across the Great Nafūd desert in the northern Arabian Peninsula. Shāyiʿ’s corpus of extant poems are preserved in narratives about his chivalrous exploits transmitted orally for centuries. In this volume, Marcel Kurpershoek vividly translates the deeds and verses of this compelling poet, based on recordings of late-twentieth century reciters, a testament to Shāyiʿ’s prominence as an embodiment of Bedouin virtue, courage, wiliness, and generosity.
Born with one eye, Shāyiʿ presents himself as unattractive and unassuming, only to reveal a hero’s strength, sagacity, and wiliness. In a number of stories, he is shown hiding his identity, whether in disguise as an impoverished Bedouin or on a camel deliberately made to look mangy and weak. In the oral culture of the Bedouin, the epic cycle of Shāyiʿ al-Amsaḥ delights and instructs listeners through its unmasking of false appearances and its revelation of the hero’s true character.
Translated into English for the first time, these engaging tales and poems tell of dangerous desert travel, warlike exploits, chivalrous conduct and its opposite, feats of hospitality that defy belief, and convey nuggets of wisdom from the Bedouin manual of survival, making this collection a colorful compendium of the manners and customs of the tribes of northern Arabia.