Twin sisters Randa and Lamis live in the besieged Gaza Strip. Inseparable to the point that even their mother cannot tell them apart, they grow up surrounded by the random carnage that characterizes life under occupation. Randa, who wants to be a journalist, writes to record the devastation around her, taking pictures of martyred children. Meanwhile, their beloved neighbor Amna quietly converses with all those she has lost, as she plans the wedding of Lamis and her son Saleh. With their menfolk almost entirely absent, it is the women who take center stage in this poignant novel of resilience, determination, and living against the odds.
Gaza Weddings
A Novel
Ibrahim Nasrallah
Translated byNancy Roberts
12 October 2017
160 pp.
13.5X20cm
ISBN 9789774168444
For sale worldwide
$14.95
Ibrahim Nasrallah was born to Palestinian parents in Jordan in 1954, and grew up in a refugee camp there. After working as a teacher and a journalist, in 1996 he became vice-president of Darat al-Funun, Jordan’s most prominent art and cultural center. He has written fifteen collections of poetry and eleven novels as well as works of literary criticism. He is also a painter and photographer.
To read an article by Nasrallah entitled 'Writing Palestinian Historical Fiction' (December 22, 2012, Culture+Conflict), click here.
Related products
A Certain Woman
Hala El BadryTranslated byFarouk Abdel Wahab
In this prize-winning novel, Nahid is a woman determined to go on a journey of self discovery and understanding. As we accompany her in her sometimes delirious, sometimes lucid journey, we are given rare glimpses of the inner thoughts and feelings of a woman confronting questions of love and intimacy within and outside of marriage. It is a story of one woman’s quest for liberation, not from a repressive society or a male-dominated world—that is easy and has been done many times before—but from self-imposed taboos that inhibit a woman’s ability to find fulfillment and to confront the many imponderables surrounding sexuality, desire, and love. Stuck—by conscious choice to keep up the genteel appearances of her middle-class family—in a loveless marriage to Mustafa, the forty-something Nahid finds love and sex with novelist and journalist Omar—himself trapped in a loveless, but not sexless, marriage to Maggie. Although their love story is at the very heart of the novel, we are given broad glimpses of the larger picture of the world outside through Nahid’s work as an archaeologist and Omar’s as a journalist. The novel was well received by women readers, critics, and reviewers and by a majority of the male audience, while a vociferous minority of male critics felt scandalized by it, finding it unseemly that such issues should be raised by a woman. Now English readers can judge for themselves.
...read more
1 September 2006
Paperback
226 pp.12.5X20cm
$15.95
Black Magic
An Egyptian Novel
Hamdy el-GazzarTranslated by Humphrey Davies
As a fourteen-year-old, Nasir was entranced by his father’s gift of a camera, finding in it the means both to possess beauty and to assert himself. Now a hack working for state television, Nasir meets Fatin, an independent woman older than himself who has escaped a suffocating marriage and is secure in taking what she wants from life. An affair begins that quickly pulls Nasir into a whirlwind of incandescent erotic and emotional obsession. In a world of superficiality, materialism, violence, and sexual hysteria seen through the unforgiving lens of his camera, Nasir’s life is in limbo. A yearning for escape and a fear of loneliness propel him into a relationship in which he is at once enraptured and non-committal. The resolution of this volatile mix lies in a violent confrontation between repulsion and desire. Black Magic was awarded the prestigious Sawiris Foundation Prize in Egyptian Literature in 2006.
...read more
30 June 2014
Paperback
192 pp.12.5X20cm
$17.95
Being Abbas el Abd
Ahmed AlaidyTranslated by Humphrey Davies
“The millennial generation’s most celebrated literary achievement.”—Al-Ahram Weekly “The first glimmer of hope for a true fictional renaissance—an instantly rewarding read embraced by an unprecedented range of literary figures”—The Daily Star
“What is madness?” asks the narrator of Ahmed Alaidy’s jittery, funny, and angry novel. Assuring readers that they are about to find out, the narrator takes us on a journey through the insanity of present-day Cairo—in and out of minibuses, malls, and crash pads, navigating the city’s pinball machine of social life with tolerable efficiency. But lurking under the rocks in his grouchy, chain-smoking, pharmaceutically-oriented, twenty-something life are characters like his elusive psychiatrist uncle with a disturbing interest in phobias. And then there’s Abbas, the narrator’s best friend who surfaces at critical moments to drive our hero into uncontrollably multiplying difficulties. For instance, there’s the ticklish situation with the simultaneous blind-dates Abbas has set up for him on different levels of a coffee-shop in a Cairo mall with two girls both called Hind. With friends like Abbas, what paranoiac needs enemies?
...read more
15 October 2009
Paperback
144 pp.12.5X20cm
$16.95
A Dog with No Tail
Hamdi Abu GolayyelTranslated byRobin Moger
In a world with no meaning, meaning is an act . . . This is a story about building things up and knocking them down. Here are the campfire tales of Egypt’s dispossessed and disillusioned, the anti-Arabian Nights. Our narrator, a rural immigrant from the Bedouin villages of the Fayoum, an aspiring novelist and construction laborer of the lowest order, leads us down a fractured path of reminiscence in his quest for purpose and identity in a world where the old orders and traditions are powerless to help. Bawdy and wistful, tragicomic and bitter, his stories loop and repeat, crackling with the frictive energy of colliding worlds and linguistic registers. These are the tales of Cairo’s new Bedouin, men not settled by the state but permanently uprooted by it. Like their lives, their stories are dislocated and unplotted, mapping out their quest for meaning in the very act of placing brick on brick and word on word.
...read more
30 December 2015
Paperback
160 pp.15X23cm
$14.95