'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...' – The Guardian.From hostage-video makers in Baghdad, to human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, institutionalised paranoia in the Saddam years, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam... Blasim’s stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, spanning over twenty years and taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, as well as of...

** WINNER OF THE ENGLISH PEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION AWARD ****LONG-LISTED FOR THE 2013 FRANK O'CONNOR INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD****BOOK OF THE MONTH IN THE SKINNY**'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...'– The Guardian.A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror…A deviser of crosswords survives a car-bomb attack, only to discover he is now h...

** WINNER OF THE ENGLISH PEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION AWARD ** **LONG-LISTED FOR THE 2013 FRANK O'CONNOR INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD** **BOOK OF THE MONTH IN THE SKINNY** Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive... The Guardian. 'Bolao-esque in its visceral exuberance, and also Borgesian in its gnomic complexity... a master of metaphor.' The Guardian. A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror. A devis...

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's unforgettable epic.Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy; they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers' fortr...

Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day of becoming a journalist, she was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Her father was in the import/export business and her mother was a doctor.Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. From that moment, Latifa, just 16 years old became a prisoner in her own home. Her school was closed. Her mother was banned from working. The simplest and most basic freedo...

Finalist for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction“A lyrical, extremely rich narrative of loss, memory, and trauma.” — STARRED review, Kirkus ReviewsAn extraordinary account of survival in Syria’s most notorious military prisons that is written with “brutal clarity — and yet, there is a poetic quality to the telling.” — Frances Itani, award-winning author of Deafening and Remembering the Bo...

One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."A contemporary tragedy of epic proportions. No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting".Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ.On the third day of Ramadan, the villa...

Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2018This number one best-selling title in Iraq, Dubai, and the UAE is a heart-rending tale of two girls growing up in war-torn BaghdadBaghdad, 1991. The Gulf War is raging. Two girls, hiding in an air raid shelter, tell stories to keep the fear and the darkness at bay, and a deep friendship is born. But as the bombs continue to fall and friends begin to flee the country, the girls m...

Honour killing persists across the Middle East, where regimes refrain from tackling primitive traditions for fear of sparking unrest. Ayse Onal interviewed imprisoned men in Turkey convicted of killing their mothers, sisters and daughters. The result is a revealing and ultimately tragic account of ruined lives - both the victims' and the killers' - in a country where state and religion conspire to hush up the killing of hundreds of women every year.

From 'Morocco's greatest living author' (The Guardian) comes a heartbreaking novel about parents and children, the powerful pull of home and the yearning for tradition and family. Mohammed has spent the past 40 years working in France. As he approaches retirement, he takes stock of his life - his devotion to Islam and to his assimilated children - and decides to return to Morocco, where he spends his life's savings building the biggest house in the village and waiting for his children and ...

Khartoum, according to one theory, takes its name from the Beja word hartooma, meaning meeting place . Geographically, culturally and historically, the Sudanese capital is certainly that: a meeting place of the Blue and White Niles, a confluence of Arabic and African histories, and a destination point for countless refugees displaced by Sudan s long, troubled history of forced migration.In the pages of this book the first major anthology of Sudanese stories to be translated into En...

It was part youthful zeal and part teen crush that led Zarah Ghahramani to join a student protest movement. But dabbling in student politics was to lead to disaster when one day she was bundled into a car and taken to Tehran's most notorious prison: Evin. Far from her comfortable middle-class home, Zarah had to find refuge from her ruthless interrogators in a windowless concrete cell. Day after day she was humiliated and viciously beaten until all she wanted was simply to die, her spirit b...