Set in the author’s own Nile-side neighborhood of Warraq, Aslan’s second novel, the first to be translated and published in English, chronicles the daily rhythm of life of rural migrants to Cairo and their complex webs of familial and neighborly relations over half a century. It opens with the mysterious disappearance of the tiny grandmother, Hanem, who is over 100 years old and is last seen by her daughter-in-law Dalal. Dalal does not have the heart to tell Hanem that her grown children Nargis and Abdel Reheem have both been dead for some time. Her grandson Mr. Abdalla, who has children of his own and not a few flecks of gray in his hair, reluctantly sets out for their home village to search for her, embarking on a bittersweet odyssey into his family’s past and a confrontation with his own aging. In an elliptical narrative, Aslan limns a series of vignettes that mimic the workings of memory, moving backward and forward in time and held together by a series of recurrent figures and images. There is Abdalla’s father, the tragic al-Bahey Uthman; his quirky and earthy uncle Abdel Reheem; and his sweet mother, Nargis, who dies with her simplest desires unfulfilled. Aslan’s moving portrait of the quotidian dramas that constitute the lives of ordinary Egyptians is untainted by populist pretensions or belittling romanticism, and full of the humor and heartbreaking pathos that have become trademarks of the author’s style.
Nile Sparrows
Ibrahim Aslan
Translated byMona El-Ghobashy
1 March 2009
128 pp.
12.5X20cm
ISBN 9789774162404
For sale worldwide
$14.95
Related products
Days in the Diaspora
An Egyptian Novel
Kamal RuhayyimTranslated by Sarah Enany
“How could a good Muslim boy like you be born into a Jewish family!” For Galal, forced to leave Egypt in the 1960s Jewish exodus with his family, the Diaspora has none of the beauty of a rich tapestry of history; it is a day-to-day struggle to fit into his new life in Paris, reconcile the conflicting demands of family and friends, and come to terms with who he is. The quest for belonging and identity is at the heart of this sensitive and tender narrative. Earthy, rambunctious supporting characters burst from the page, spontaneous, emotional, yet, for all their façade of confidence, no less adrift than Galal himself. Ruhayyim’s Paris of the 1960s is startlingly relevant: then, as now, religion offers an illusory source of community and identity for migrants to the west, not fitting in, yet cut off from their roots. Deeply personal, this unusual, uplifting coming-of-age novel takes us into the heart of an ordinary young man in the grip of an unforgiving historical moment.
...read more
15 June 2012
Paperback
308 pp.15X23cm
$17.95
candygirl
An Egyptian Novel
M.M. TawfikTranslated bythe author
Trying to evade intelligence agencies out to assassinate him, the Cerebellum, an Egyptian scientist with a past association with the Iraqi nuclear program, rents a room on the roof of a brothel in a Cairo slum. His interaction with the other residents is limited; instead he spends most of his time in the virtual world, where he has a love affair with candygirl, a gorgeous avatar. On the other side of the planet, an ex-NSA agent has joined a secret organization whose mission is to assassinate Iraqi scientists. He does not allow his doubts about the legality—or the ethics—of his mission to interfere with his work. He chases his victim relentlessly, but when his top-of-the-line equipment fails to locate the Cerebellum in Cairo’s slums, he takes the chase to the virtual world.
...read more
15 January 2013
Paperback
226 pp.15X23cm
$17.95
Absent
Betool KhedairiTranslated byMuhayman Jamil
Absent tells the story of Dalal, a young Iraqi woman living with the childless aunt and uncle who raised her. Dalal and her neighbors try to maintain normal lives, despite the crippling effect of bombings and international sanctions resulting from the first Gulf War. By turns affectionate, wry, and darkly comic, Absent paints a moving portrait of people struggling to get by in impossible circumstances. Upstairs, the fortune-teller Umm Mazin offers her customers cures for their physical and romantic ailments; below, Saad the hairdresser attends to a dwindling number of female customers; and on the second floor, the nurse Ilham dreams of her long-lost French mother to escape the grim realities she sees in the children’s ward at the hospital. With memories of happier times during the “Days of Plenty” of her childhood, Dalal falls in love for the first time against a background of surprise arrests, personal betrayals, and a crumbling social fabric that turns neighbors into informants. Tightly crafted and skillfully told, Absent is a haunting portrait of life under sanctions, the fragile emotional ties between individuals, and, ultimately, the resilience of the human spirit.
...read more
Paperback
224 pp.15X23cm
$18.95
Birds of Amber
Ibrahim Abdel MeguidTranslated byFarouk Abdel Wahab
During the 1956 Suez War—or the Tripartite Aggression, as it is known in Egypt—life in Alexandria goes on. The railroad workers and their families live in the low-income housing of el-Masakin, along the Mahmudiya Canal, but some of them take us on forays into the other, cosmopolitan Alexandria, whose European denizens, mainly Greeks, Italians, and Jews are departing in droves. This spellbinding novel teems with memorable characters, not a few of whom are themselves storytellers: a budding novelist writing about el-Masakin and its eccentric denizens and about his own improbable love affair with a 12-year-old girl; a spice merchant dreaming of the bygone glory of his ancestors and their trade along the spice road, beginning on the Malabar Coast; a train guard who is a teller of very tall tales; and a would-be filmmaker trying to make a film showing what happened in Port Said during the war. Then there is the cinema aficionado who plays Tarzan in real life along the Mahmudiya Canal; the young boy who leads a group of assorted crazies every afternoon to see ‘God’ at sunset; the singing nurse whose only dream is to perform on the radio; and Arabi, the young man who is in love with all things European, but especially with his employer, Katina the widowed Greek dressmaker. As in his earlier novel, No One Sleeps in Alexandria, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid here combines historical fact with fiction, and the mundane with the fantastical, to weave an engrossing, multilayered story of stories.
...read more
Hardbound
432 pp.15X23cm
$24.95