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All That I Want to Forget

All That I Want to Forget
Fatima loves poetry and wants to study French literature—both of which are anathema to her strict and conservative much older brother, Saqr. While living under his roof, Fatima’s hopes and dreams are scrutinized, mocked, and slowly crushed as she is forced into his narrow vision of the right path.

Then Fatima meets Isam, a poet like her; they email love letters to each other and meet in secret. Saqr, however, has other ideas: she is married off to Faris, a complete stranger. He is not the cruel tyrant her brother was, but still she did not choose him.

Will she escape her past to live the life of love and poetry she craves?

Autumn Quail

Autumn Quail

This is the story of one man and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Isa al-Dabbagh is a senior civil servant in the Egyptian government who loses his job, and his fiancee, when the Purge Committees of the Revolution bring his venal past to light. His personal relationships reflect the resulting internal conflict he suffers between mind and heart, between intellectual acceptance of the Revolution and the basic emotional instincts that hold him back.

Adrift on the Nile

Adrift on the Nile

The book starts out with Anis Zani, the protagonist, being disciplined by his boss for submitting a blank report. It’s revealed that Anis wrote the report under the influence of drugs, which prevented him from realizing his pen was out of ink. Anis and a group of fellow addicts get together every night to smoke keif on a houseboat on the Nile.

Samara, a young journalist, visits the group in order to report on them. The tranquility of the group collapses as they begin to argue about topics like love, morality and purpose. The downfall of the group is accelerated when, one night as they are taking a midnight excursion by car, they hit a person and flee the scene.

Bled Dry

Bled Dry

(2018) The first book in the Detective Hanash crime series When an ill-fated, young prostitute and her lover are killed in a gruesome double murder, seasoned investigator Detective Hanash is called in. The case draws him and his team into the poverty of Casablanca’s slums, blighted by criminality, religious extremism, and despair. Hanash’s years on the job have made him intimately familiar with the city’s seedy underbelly, but this time he harbors a personal connection to one of the victims, one he must conceal at all costs.

All the Battles

All the Battles

(2017) A powerful novel of struggle and transformation in the rough world of boxing When he first showed up at Captain Ali’s run-down boxing club, Saed was mocked for his bourgeois manners then humiliated in the ring. After barely a year of training, he has been consumed by the world of boxing and tipped for greatness. As his star rises, Saed is faced with the challenger he came for, but at what cost? Maan Abu Taleb’s debut novel is one of heady victories and crushing defeats. Driven by direct, lean prose, All the Battles is a compelling story of class, identity, and personal transformation.

Book of Safety

Book of Safety

(2017) An intriguing and unexpected narrative of modern Cairo Khaled transcribes testimonies at the Palace of Confessions, a shadowy state-run agency situated in a respectable Cairo suburb. There he encounters Mustafa Ismail: a university professor turned master thief, who breaks into the homes of the great and the good and then blackmails them into silence. Mustafa has dedicated his existence to the perfection of his trade and authored The Book of Safety, the ultimate guide to successful thievery. With cool and incisive prose, Yasser Abdel Hafez follows Khaled into obsession with this mysterious book and its author.

Baghdad Eucharist

Baghdad Eucharist

(2017) An intimate and remarkably human novel of modern Iraq by an acclaimed Arab-American author, shortlisted for the Arabic Booker Displaced by the sectarian violence in the city, Maha and her husband are taken in by a distant cousin, Youssef. As the growing turmoil around them seeps into their household, a rare argument breaks out between the elderly Youssef and his young guest. Born into sanctions and war, Maha knows nothing of Iraq’s good years that Youssef holds dear. Set over a single day, The Baghdad Eucharist is an intimate story of love, memory, and anguish in one Christian family.

Before the Throne

Before the Throne

(2016) The Nobel laureate puts Egypt’s leaders on trial In this extraordinary drama-in-dialogue, Naguib Mahfouz reveals his love for all of Egypt’s extensive history—and his deep knowledge of it. In Before the Throne, he summons nearly sixty of Egypt’s rulers to the afterlife Court of Osiris, from a king who unified Egypt for the first time, around 3000 BC, to a president assassinated by religious extremists in 1981. He includes names as familiar as the pharaoh Ramesses II and as obscure as the medieval vizier Qaraqush. Defending their behavior before the divine tribunal, those who acted for the nation’s good are honored with immortality, but those who failed to protect it leave the gilded hall of eternal justice with a very different verdict. Full of Mahfouz’s unique insight into his country’s timeless qualities, this controversial work skillfully traces five thousand years of Egypt’s past as it flows into the present, through the mind of its most acclaimed author.

Beginning and the End

Beginning and the End

(2016) One of the Nobel laureate’s best known early novels in a new paperback edition Set in Cairo during World War II, this novel is a masterpiece of human compassion reflecting with sympathy and well-balanced pathos the material, moral, and spiritual problems of an Egyptian family. Suddenly confronted with poverty when the father, its sole support, dies unexpectedly, the family’s middle-class respectability and conformity can only be supported on the backs of a brother and a sister who sacrifice their own reputations by immersing themselves in the seamy underworld of Cairo.

Beautiful White Cat Walks with

Beautiful White Cat Walks with

(2016) A modern Moroccan tale of power, love, and loss Hassan makes a living in his native Marrakesh as a comic writer and performer, through his satirical sketches critical of Morocco’s rulers. Yet when he is suddenly conscripted into a losing war in the Sahara, and drafted to a far-flung desert outpost, it seems that all is lost. Could his estranged father, close to power as the king’s private jester, have something to do with his sudden removal from the city? And will he ever see his beloved wife Zinab again? With flowing prose and black humor, Youssef Fadel subtly tells the story of 1980s Morocco.