Must-Read Fiction by Arab and Arab American Authors
Celebrate Arab American Heritage Month by reading literary fiction that illuminates the many voices of the Arab and Arab American community. There are plenty of amazing stories to keep you entertained all month long, and throughout the rest of the year!
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by Hisham Matar
A novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return. One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio. Obsessed by the power of those words, Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home. When a chance encounter brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.
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The Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick
by Laila Lalami
From Laila Lalami — the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR) — comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
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The Skin and Its Girl
by Sarah Cypher
A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great-aunt’s secrets in this sweeping debut, confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage. The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us — and wield even the power to restore a broken family.
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Between Two Moons
by Aisha Abdel Gawad
It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parent’s roof. A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.
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Watch Us Dance
by Leila Slimani
It’s the 1960s, and the air is electric. On the cusp of adulthood, two biracial siblings — their father is Moroccan, their mother French — search for their place in a newly independent Morocco brimming with both possibility and peril. Leila Slimani draws on her family’s inspiring story to deliver a tense, provocative, page-turning novel about one family’s, and one country’s, coming of age in the face of the seductions of power and privilege.
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The Occasional Virgin
by Hanan al-Shaykh
On a sunny beach on the Italian Riviera, two thirtysomething women, Yvonne and Huda, relax by the sparkling sea. But despite the setting, as their vacation unfolds, their complicated pasts seep through to the idyllic present. Witty and wry, The Occasional Virgin is a poignant and perceptive story of the tumultuous lives and sometimes shocking choices of two women successful in their careers but unlucky in love.
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Palace Walk
by Naguib Mahfouz
The novels of the Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk, the first in the series, introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, and his three sons. The family’s trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two world wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries.
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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What Strange Paradise
by Omar El Akkad
From the widely acclaimed, bestselling author of American War — a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving novel that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child. What Strange Paradise is the story of finding your way through a hostile world, but it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair — and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.
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Mother of Strangers
by Suad Amiry
At times darkly humorous and ironic but also profoundly moving, this novel based on a true story, follows the lives of a gifted 15-year-old mechanic, Subhi, and 13-year-old Shams, a peasant girl he hopes to marry one day. At first we see the prosperous life of the cosmopolitan city of Jaffa, but as the story evolves, the indiscriminate bombing of the city and the displacements of Palestinian families begin, and we get a fascinating, though dark, close-up of how those who remained survived. This novel is a cinematic account of one of the most dramatic and least known chapters of Palestinian history, a portrait of a city, and a people irrevocably changed.
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You Exist Too Much
by Zaina Arafat
Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine — Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings — for love, and a place to call home.
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Belladonna
by Anbara Salam
Isabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella. In the summer of 1957, the girls land a coveted spot at a prestigious art history school in northern Italy. There, free of her claustrophobic home and the town that will always see her and her Egyptian mother as outsiders, Bridget discovers she can reinvent herself as anyone she desires…perhaps even someone Isabella could desire in return. But as the glittering year goes on, Bridget begins to suspect Isabella is keeping a secret from her, one that will change the course of their lives forever.
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The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman
by Melanie Magidow
Published in English for the first time, and the only Arabic epic named for a woman, The Tale of Princess Fatima recounts the thrilling adventures of a legendary medieval warrior universally known throughout the Middle East and long overdue to join world literature’s pantheon of female heroes.
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Arab Boy Delivered
by Paul Aziz Zarou
Read by Peter Ganim
As Michael maneuvers through his working-class neighborhood delivering groceries, he enters the homes and lives of his customers. Michael grieves with a mother whose only son died in the Vietnam War and is embraced by the first black couple who move into the neighborhood. The people he meets shape him. His mind is a potpourri of his experiences: hatred, kindness, his own sexual awakening. Michael struggles to figure out who this dutiful son of an immigrant family is becoming in a rapidly emerging modern world.
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The Republic of False Truths
by Alaa Al Aswany
A powerful story about the Egyptian revolution, taking us inside the battle raging between those in power and those prepared to lay down their lives in the defense of freedom. With an unforgettably vivid cast of characters and a heart-pounding narrative that is still banned across much of the region, Alaa Al Aswany gives us a deeply human portrait of the Egyptian Revolution, and an impassioned retelling of his country’s turbulent recent history.
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The Frightened Ones
by Dima Wannous
In her therapist’s waiting room in Damascus, Suleima meets a strange and reticent man named Naseem, and they soon begin a tense affair. But when Naseem, a writer, flees Syria for Germany, he sends Suleima the unfinished manuscript for his novel. To Suleima’s surprise, she and the novel’s protagonist are uncannily similar. As she reads, Suleima’s past overwhelms her and she has no idea what to trust — Naseem’s pages, her own memory, or nothing at all? The Frightened Ones is a boundary-blurring, radical examination of the effects of oppression on one’s sense of identity, the effects of collective trauma, and a moving window into life inside Assad’s Syria.
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