Mai Al-Nakib

An Unlasting Home (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she recognises less and less. Yet since her return from California after her mother's death, a certain inertia has kept her there. When she is accused of blasphemy - which carries with it the threat of execution - Sara realises she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all.

Awaiting trial, Sara retraces the past, intent on examining the lives of the women who made her. Interspersed with her narratives are the stories of her grandmothers: beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in old Kuwait and swept off to India by her wealthy merchant husband; and her two mothers: Noura, who dreams of building a life in America, and her ayah Maria, who leaves her own children behind in Pune to help raise Sara and her brother Karim.

Spanning Kuwait, Lebanon, Iraq, India and the United States, An Unlasting Home brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable family portrait and a spellbinding epic tale.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Saqi Books
• Seitenzahl: 400
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. April 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780863569371
• Artikelnr.: 67437669

Autorenporträt

Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait and spent the first six years of her life in London, Edinburgh, and St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University. Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, won the Edinburgh International Book Festival's First Book Award in 2014. Her fiction and essays have appeared in various publications, including Ninth Letter, The First Line, After the Pause, World Literature Today, and the BBC World Service. She lives in Kuwait and is working on her second novel.

Rezensionen

"This sweeping debut novel from Al-Nakib (after the collection The Hidden Light of Objects) imagines an alternate reality for contemporary Kuwait in which blasphemy is made a capital crime...Al-Nakib renders each family member with care and exacting observation." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"So fresh and unsettling that it will enchant you from the first page and linger for days after reading. ... Deftly written. ... Its epic family saga style echoes that of Hala Alyan's Salt Houses and The Arsonists' City, Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies, and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"Deeply enchanting, at times suspenseful, and always engaging, An Unlasting Home is filled with tales of women's lives and their intersection with the often volatile and unpredictable currents of nations, war, and political history. Mai Al-Nakib's storyteller's voice is fresh and original-her book grabbed me from the outset and kept me entranced to the last page." - Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Fencing with the King and Crescent

"An Unlasting Home is an unforgettable story of people making choices for love, family, freedom, and identity against the tidal forces of history in the Arab region. Shimmering with poetic prose, and as pressingly real as the white heat of August in Baghdad, this poignant debut will keep you in its thrall." - Juhea Kim, author of Beasts of a Little Land

"A spellbinding family history unfolds as a Kuwaiti woman goes on trial for blasphemy in a world gone mad. Deftly written, structurally brilliant, Mai Al-Nakib's An Unlasting Home is a lasting novel that splits open time, leaps across continents, and creates the sort of characters we carry forward into our hearts and lives. I absolutely loved this book." - A. Manette Ansay

"Grapples profoundly with the limits of individual choice and the hold exerted by a person's homeland...accomplished and searing." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This smooth, fast-flowing narrative stands as a testament to the eternal vibrancy and pluck of women in the Arab world." - Financial Times

"Mai Al-Nakib lyrically explores themes of homeland, tradition and agency as she relates the stories of generations of Arab women across Kuwait, the US, Iraq, India and Lebanon." - Ms. magazine

"A sweeping novel that will stick with readers for a long time." - Debutiful

"For lovers of sweeping, multigenerational epics like Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing or Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, this story following three generations of Arab women will strike right at the heart." - Bitch Media

"An ambitious family epic with a historical sweep, an elegy to grandmothers and mothers who were forced from their original homes by personal or political circumstances in the Middle East to build nests elsewhere." - World Literature Today

"Refreshing and eye-opening." - Electric Literature

"Penetrating insight and such compressed lyricism that at times her prose seems to border on poetry. A densely imagined and beautifully written debut." - Sydney Morning Herald on The Hidden Light of Objects

"The Hidden Light of Objects marks the emergence of an author already confident in her craft and her ability to give voice to the emotions and yearnings of her characters." - New Internationalist

"The old world and the new. The strife in the Gulf, once peaceful and reflective. East and West, Arabic and English, the poetry of the heart, the eye of the hawk; all these elements produce the lustrous pearls of Mai Al-Nakib's short stories." - Hanan al-Shaykh, author of Beirut Blues, on The Hidden Light of Objects

"The Hidden Light of Objects brings forth both the light and the shadows of the contemporary Middle East in clean-edged prose that startles us, not with sudden violence or polemic, but with the ineluctable force of human desire. Kuwait itself becomes a character, full of contradictions, in this multifaceted set of stories and vignettes. Superb." - Lucy Ferriss, author of The Lost Daughter