Hani was out for an evening stroll near Cairo’s Tahrir Square when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. An informant had identified him, and he was thrown into the back of a police truck. There began a seven-month nightmare as he was swept up, along with fifty other men, in the infamous Queen Boat affair that targeted Egypt’s gay community.
Finally free, but traumatized into speechlessness, Hani writes down the events of his life—his first sexual desires, his relationship with his mother, his marriage of convenience, and his passion for Abdel Aziz, the only man he ever truly loved.
In the Spider’s Room is a sensitive and courageous account of life as a gay man in Egypt.
In the Spider’s Room
A Novel
Hani was out for an evening stroll near Cairo’s Tahrir Square when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. An informant had identified him, and he was
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Born in 1977, Muhammad Abdelnabi is the author of two novels and four short-story collections. His The Ghost of Anton Chekov won first prize in the Emerging Writers category of the Sawiris Cultural Award for short-story collections in 2011. In the Spider’s Room was shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and was joint winner of the 2017 Sawiris Cultural Award for novels in the Emerging Writers category. He lives near Banha in Egypt.Jonathan Wright
Jonathan Wright is a British literary translator and former journalist currently based in London. His numerous translations into English most recently include, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, winner of International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He studied Arabic, Turkish and Islamic civilization at Oxford University and served both as Reuters' Cairo bureau chief and as Reuters’ U.S. foreign policy correspondent based in their Washington, D.C. office.
