
Throughout 2024, we were thrilled to see the well-deserved recognition that Hoopoe novels and authors have received, along with last year’s growing excitement from readers around the world. As we look ahead to an equally bright 2025, we’ve gathered together some of the standout moments that reflect the wide appeal and rising popularity of these special titles. They will make a perfect addition to your 2025 TBR (To Be Read) list.


Elizabeth Loudon’s A Stranger in Baghdad (Hoopoe, 2023) won the 2024 International Fiction Book Award at the Sharjah International Book Fair. This intergenerational novel, which was longlisted for the Bridport Novel Award and named one of the “51 Favorite Books of 2023” by the Washington Independent Review of Books, offers a moving and an intricate portrayal of a mother and daughter navigating life as outsiders in both Baghdad and London.

Furthermore, A Stranger in Baghdad appeared as a book club favorite in several areas. From a book club gathering in Nottinghamshire to a lively discussion at Green College, Oxford, to a Massachusetts book group led by Yvonne Freccero, translator of The Scapegoat and founder of Friends of Hampshire County Homeless Individuals, and heading in January 2025 to Florida, USA, to join the Through Women’s Eyes’ Book Club.

In 2024, The Jinn Daughter by Rania Hanna captured the hearts of readers across the United States and gained significant recognition from prestigious outlets and events. From glowing reviews to engaging book tour moments, the novel’s journey this year has been remarkable. Below are some of the highlights that showcase the widespread acclaim and attention this fantasy novel has received:
- ELLE Magazine (US) selected The Jinn Daughter as one of the best fantasy books of 2024, describing it as “A lush and mesmerizing story of motherhood and magic.”
- Hailed by Book Riot as one of the “10 exciting books to read this summer,” (Summer 2024), and at one point during this summer, reported that The Jinn Daughter was one of “Two of the Most Popular Books on the StoryGraph.”
Rania Hanna’s The Jinn Daughter has also deeply connected with readers across various cities in the United States. From intimate book discussions to lively festivals, Hanna has shared the secrets of her fantasy world and the intriguing characters within her novel.

Some highlights from her tour include her participation as a Featured Fiction Author at the 2024 Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books, as well as her appearance at the Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. So far, Hanna also has a featured spot at the 13th Annual Movable Feast, hosted by Bookmarks in North Carolina, where she will connect with even more fans within these vibrant literary communities.
In addition to these events, Hanna engaged with readers in a variety of other settings. She participated in a book discussion at the End Bookstore in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and took part in an Indie Bookstore Day Meet-&-Greet at Scrawl Books in Reston, Viriginia. Hanna also connected with her audience at the Falls Church Boozy Book Fair at Audacious Aleworks Brewery & Taproom, as well as at the Busboys & Poets, Washington (Watch the YouTube recording here), where she shared insights into her creative process.

The Jinn Daughter was chosen by The Markaz Review book club as their October 2024 pick, and was included in a book club meeting hosted by Solid State Books in Washington, DC

A Nose and Three Eyes by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, translated by Jonathan Smolin, with a foreword by Hanan al-Shaykh (Hoopoe, 2024) has been selected as one of Brittle Paper’s 100 Notable African Books of 2024. The novel has been recognized for how it represents the creativity in African literary culture today.
A Nose and Three Eyes will be highlighted in AUC Press’s special virtual book discussion, co-sponsored by Stanford University Press, on 21 January 2025. The discussion will feature Jonathan Smolin, translator of I Do Not Sleep and A Nose and Three Eyes in conversation with Sharif Abdel Kouddous, independent journalist and grandson of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous. Moderated by Gretchen McCullough, fiction writer, literary critic, and senior instructor at the American University in Cairo, the discussion will explore the life, works, and politics of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous.
The conversation will focus on the first of Abdel Kouddous’s novels translated into English by Smolin, along with his latest book, The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser, published by Stanford University Press.

Radwa Ashour’s Granada: The Complete Trilogy (Hoopoe, 2024), a timeless literary novel named as one of the Arab Writers’ Union’s 105 best Arabic novels of the twentieth century, invites a new generation of readers to explore its profound narrative and enduring themes through Kay Heikkinen’s meticulous translation, which preserves the work’s depth and vitality.
Ashour’s Granada trilogy examines the fall of Andalusia while exploring themes of belonging and identity, seamlessly blending history and fiction. Ashour’s profound themes and evocative storytelling have been widely celebrated. This acclaim was further highlighted during a recent virtual book discussion hosted by AUC Press, featuring the trilogy’s award-winning translator Kay Heikkinen, fellow translator Sarah Enany, historian Mayte Green-Mercado, and Marcia Lynx Qualey, editor of Arabic Literature: In Translation and a renowned literary critic.
The trilogy has also received praise from prominent authors, scholars, and translators in a feature by Arabic Literature: In Translation.
It was recognized in Words Without Borders’ The Watchlist: November 2024 and described by The Times Literary Supplement as a parallel to Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy on Tudor England.
“The publication of the complete Granada trilogy, by the Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour (1946–2014), in Kay Heikkinen’s vivid and elegant translation, is a moment of grand culmination, rather like the much-awaited final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Like Mantel’s series, Granada—which chronicles the two-century destruction of Moorish Spain—is a feat of profound scholarship, an examination of how history is invented, imagined and instrumentalized in contrast to how it is experienced and lived.”—Patricia Storace, Times Literary Supplement

Granada was chosen by The Markaz Review book club as their January 2025 pick, featuring the trilogy’s award-winning translator, Kay Heikkinen.

History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi, translated by Alexander E. Elinson (Hoopoe, 2023) was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize 2024 in March 2024, longlisted for the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize For Arabic Literary Translation, and featured by the Daily Star in its roundup of 8 books in translation for Women in Translation Month (August 2024), describing it as: “Narrated in vivid details. . . . this is a book about fortitude, power and the sheer will to freedom.” —The Daily Star

The House of the Coptic Woman by Ashraf El-Ashmawi, translated by Peter Daniel (Hoopoe, 2023) was longlisted for the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize For Arabic Literary Translation.
The novel is a tightly plotted, taboo-breaking, and explosive story that takes readers to the roots of religious strife, where the smallest spark can start a bonfire. With echoes of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Diary of a Country Prosecutor, it is a powerful and personal tale of conflict, crime, and upheaval in rural Egypt.

Time of White Horses by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Nancy Roberts (Hoopoe, 2016), has been chosen by the Filmmaker Youssef El Deeb to be transformed into a series and it is currently undergoing a crowd-funded project by Historia Pictures, a Canadian Federal Not-For-Profit Corporation as it is as he described it “a rich tapestry of Palestinian culture that is interesting to discover.” The novel explores the collapse of Ottoman rule and the British Mandate in Palestine through the story of three generations of a defiant family from the Palestinian village of Hadiya before 1948.