R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
Photograph courtesy of © 2020 Marwan Chamaa
A few minutes after 6:00pm, Beirut time, on August 4th, I received an all too familiar WhatsApp message from a friend “Family in Beirut ok?”. I instantly knew what this meant: Something somewhere in Beirut must have exploded. I immediately go to Twitter, seeking an answer to my question: Gas leak or booby trapped car?
Ok, immediate family is safe WhatsApp confirms in parallel. I was not too worried at first. But the tone on Twitter was alarming.
Out of the gutter is a most unusual read: A saga that mixes tragedy, and a dark, off the wall humor.
A daughter and her mother in an apartment in London. Every evening, they meet, with an occasional glass of whisky, going over the times, not so long ago, where they were a large family, all women, living in Damascus.
Sudan, 1968, the military coup taking place in Khartoum echoes all the way to the small rural town of Hajer Narti, where the body of a young girl has just been found in the Nile.
Told in the first person, Asma Al Atawna’s debut coming of age novel captures with beautiful and surprising honesty the life of an eponym young woman.
As it presented several books worthy of attention, the Irish times (June 26, 2020) specified, regarding Dima Wannous’ “The Frightened ones”:
“Mention of a novel set in Syria might suggests a story mired in violence and suffering, but in ‘The Frightened Ones’ by Dima Wannous, translated by Elisabeth Jacquette (Harvilll Secker, 242pp, £12.99) the emphasis is on the anguish of Suleima,
As Khalifa’s “Death is hard work” was a finalist of the Premio Gregor Von rezzori award 2020, his previous novel “There are no knives in the kitchens of the city” gains attention in German speaking territory, and was featured in a dedicated 4 minutes film on 3 Sat TV!
Il Manifesto, May, 2020
In an interview to Il Manifesto, Hoda Barakat, first woman to win the prestigious International Prize for Arabic fiction 2019 (or Arab Booker) shares:
“This is the story of a noble people, rooted in the plains of civilization and the park of history”
