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As publication dates often slip, we try to have a glance at what’s really coming in translation from Arabic at the start of each month. If you have more books to add, please let us know.
From the publisher:
“A girl must save herself and her family after discovering her society’s secrets in this sci-fi novel in translation. I Want Golden Eyes is set on the Comoros Islands at the end of this century in a futuristic city called Quartzia, the home of a genetically privileged minority called the Golden Eyes. The rest of the population, the Limiteds, live in a cavity called the Hive beneath the city. Dalia is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hive but works with her family in Quartzia at Professor Adam’s house, where she cleans, her sister grows organic food in the garden, and her deaf father works as the cook.”
You can also listen to an episode of the BULAQ podcast with Maria Dadouch.
From the publisher:
A mysterious black crate arrives at an ISIS command centre in the heart of occupied Mosul, leaving the soldiers and their captives guessing at its contents…
A refugee travels to a remote ‘Northern’ town to study race relations, only to discover one of its bridge-building initiatives is, in fact, a trap…
Drifting from job to job in a corrupt, militia-run Baghdad, a young daydreamer is asked to spy on a protest movement he finds himself entirely sympathising with…
The characters in Hassan Blasim’s latest collection all find themselves in impossible positions – from the ISIS cook working undercover to retrieve ancient manuscripts from a desecrated site, to the refugee in Northern Europe unable to process the devastating dislocation of exile. Violence, intolerance and insecurity stalk them at every turn. And yet, for all their trauma, Hassan’s stories – strung through with intrigue and absurdist humour – are somehow able to draw us in and help us appreciate the infinite complexity implicit in even the most black-and-white contexts.
From the publisher:
“Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.”
You can read an excerpt from this collection, “I Was Sand,” at ArabLit.
Nasser Rabah was also a winner of our 2024 Arabic Flash Fiction Prize, and his short story appears in Arabic and Hazem Jamjoum’s English translation in Slender Thorns: Award-winning Flash Fiction in Arabic and English. He also has a poem forthcoming in our GRIEF issue, tr. Wiam El-Tamami.
From the publisher:
The stories in this anthology demonstrate how Sana’a, Yemen’s capital city, is continually adapting and responding to new layers of pressure being put on it. With the ever-present civil war raging in the background and the constraints of religious conservatism growing tighter, they depict characters navigating their own way through trauma, finding redemption in their own ingenuity – from hallucinatory delusions, to supernatural consultations, to the upturning of gender roles. At the heart of each story is a deep-rooted appreciation for this beautiful, beleaguered city, a heart-felt connection with it that remains universally relatable.
For over a decade, Yemen has found itself the battleground of a war being fought both locally and regionally – not juist a war between the Zaydis (often referred to in the West as ‘Houthis’) and state-sponsored Salafis, but also a proxy war, being fought internationally between Iran and Saudi Arabia (backed by the US), respectively. Caught in the middle of this have been ordinary Yemeni citizens, whose precarious living standards, poverty and exposure to violence has been widely ignored by the international community. Thes stories give a glimpse into this life, and a sense of the real battles being fought in the region.
From the publisher:
Hisham Al Khattab is Yazid ibn Abih. At least he thinks he is. Some 13 centuries separate the two, but in the despaired mind of Hisham Al Khattab, and through the magical power of dreams, Hisham is Yazid.
Hisham, who is passionate about ancient manuscripts and lives off the antique book trade, is haunted by a dream in which he sees angels picking all the jasmine flowers in Basra. However, this dream is listed and interpreted in a very old book that he loves: it would be the premonitory sign of the disappearance of all the thinkers of the city. Prey to fantasies, he constantly navigates between two worlds: contemporary Cairo where he lives and Basra at the end of the 8th century, a fascinating city and a major intellectual and religious center of the nascent Islamic empire.