The novel surprises the reader as soon as page one: Saleh, the poor young man, climbs up the clock tower at the intersection of Boulevard Mohammed V and Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis to announce the resurrection. People gather around the tower, state police is brought in as the scene of the young man hanging in the air occupies the news and the talk of the population.
Through a scenic coherent structure, the novel’s passages follow each other in a mastered montage, using an intense, accurate, language that preserves its beauty, without falling into rhetoric and useless talk.

In his new novel, the author of the «Collar of purity» frees his characters from the dead-end of ready-made ideas, and weaves their lives away from preaching and proselytizing. Ghalib, Ghada, Badriya, Salman and the other characters, live the consequences of many of the disadvantages of the Saudi society

On December 12th, the Danish widely read newspaper Politiken interviewed Hawra Al Nadawi. The young writer was long-listed for the IPAF (Arab Man Booker), for her first novel ‘Under the Copenhagen sky’ published by Dar al Saqi, Lebanon, in 2010. Below, with some delay, the English translation of the interview that didn’t go unnoticed in Denmark (approximate translation — thank you Google! — as I have no knowledge whatsoever of Danish). As several Danish colleagues confessed, such a book giving an insight into the Arab emigrant population of Denmark has …

She founded Raya Agency for Arabic Literature eight years ago. After long internships in publishing houses in New York and Paris, Jraissati realised at the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair that ‘publishers interested in the Arab world couldn’t get their hands on interesting books because they can’t read them.’ Surely they often simply don’t want to, I say. She laughs. ‘That’s the other part of the story. I wanted them to be interested, so I had a mission… you can’t be interested if you don’t know anything about it, so I wanted to be some sort of medium.’

It is fascinating how religion acts as a shield against the tyranny of the family: the Quranic authority overthrows his father’s, releases him from the structure Zahi grew up with. Only gradually is this freedom limited again: It is for example forbidden to cheer during football matches, because only God can be honored and love for the team is blasphemy. The religious conversations are themselves increasingly darker: visions of hell take over the paradisiacal vistas, intimacy and contemplation is replaced by the aggressive proselytizing and moral campaigns.

She is known at home and abroad for her efforts against social and political taboos, and for her courageous books. Novels intimate only in appearance: the intertwined stories of relationships, often dramatic, hold a thousand references that tell more than many reportages, what it is like to live under dictatorship. As in “In her mirrors” an excellent translation from Elena Chiti, published in Beirut, and so far only distributed clandestinely in Syria.