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The Hidden Light of Objects

A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country’s growing hostility towards the West. A self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two belligerent classmates. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. A Kuwaiti woman returns to her family after being held captive in Iraq for a decade.

The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you may see life in the Middle East as it is really lived — adolescent love, yearnings for independence, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib’s luminous stories carefully unveil the lives of ordinary people in the Middle East — and the power of ordinary objects to hold extraordinary memories.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 256
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9789992195413
  • Genres
  • fiction, asia, contemporary
  • Release date
  • 2015