Novels from North African Writers
Introduction African Short Stories, selected and edited by the legendary Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and the prominent scholar C. L. Innes, was first published in 1985 in the Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS 270). The anthology serves as a curated map of the rich, diverse, and rapidly evolving landscape of modern African short fiction. In …
Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara is a landmark literary anthology published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Curated under the auspices of the Hay Festival and in celebration of Port Harcourt’s selection as the UNESCO World Book Capital 2014, the collection brings together thirty-nine of the most promising and distinctive writers …
Adrift on the Nile (originally published in Arabic in 1966 as Tharthara fawq al-Nil) is one of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s most critically acclaimed, experimental, and politically charged novels. Set in Cairo during the late 1960s under the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the novel serves as a devastating allegorical critique of the Egyptian intellectual …
Leila Slimani’s Adèle (originally published as Dans le jardin de l’ogre) is a visceral and haunting exploration of a woman’s descent into the depths of sex addiction, her profound alienation from the bourgeois world she inhabits, and the devastating consequences of a life built on lies. The novel follows Adèle Robinson, a journalist living in …
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s About My Mother is a profound, semi-autobiographical meditation on the slow decline of a matriarch, the nature of memory, and the intricate bonds of filial love within the context of Moroccan tradition. The narrative, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman, alternates between the narrator’s present-day observations of his …
The narrative of The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri is a sprawling, multi-generational epic that follows the lives of the three Mikkola sisters Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia and their intersection with the life of the narrator, Jonas, a writer who shares their Swedish-Tunisian heritage. Spanning from the late twentieth century into a speculative future, the …
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a chillingly prescient work of speculative fiction that explores the terrifying intersection of surveillance capitalism, predictive policing, and the commodification of the human subconscious. Set in a near-future United States, the novel details the harrowing journey of Sara Tilila Hussein, a woman trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare after …
I. The Frame: The Rusted Chocolate Tin and the Birth of Memory The narrative of Empty Cages is built upon the shifting, often unreliable sands of memory, triggered by a physical object: an old, rusted Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolate tin. The narrator, Fatma, now a woman in her sixties, finds this tin in a drawer, …
Summary of A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim Introduction and the Frame Narrative The novel is presented as a multigenerational family saga set within the beldi (aristocratic) families of Tunis, framed by the modern-day investigation of Hind Ennaifer. Hind, a professor of international law, seeks to uncover the truth behind a “jinn of …
Sleep Phase by Mohamed Kheir, translated by Robin Moger, explores the journey of Warif Shaheen, a man released into a transformed, futuristic Cairo after seven years of imprisonment. The narrative is a haunting meditation on memory, displacement, and the blurred lines between reality and a state of dreaming or “simulation.” Warif and the Reborn City …
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village is a haunting, lyrical exploration of the immigrant experience, the psychological toll of retirement, and the unbridgeable chasm between a traditional past and a modern, assimilated future. The novel follows Mohammed, a Moroccan immigrant who has spent forty years as a meticulous and conscientious worker in …
Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water is a powerful, dual-narrative novel based on the true story of Salva Dut, one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan, and the fictionalized journey of a young girl named Nya. The book juxtaposes two timelines in Southern Sudan 1985 and 2008 to explore themes of survival, perseverance, …
Jamal Mahjoub’s A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory is a dense, multi-disciplinary work that blends personal memoir, travelogue, and a forensic political history of Sudan. Writing from the perspective of an “in-betweener” the son of a Sudanese father and a British mother Mahjoub uses his return to Khartoum between 2008 and 2012 …