Hanan Al-Shaykh

A Novel

The Story of Zahra

Beirut Blues

Catherine Cobham

Women of Sand and Myrrh

امرأتان على شاطئ البحر

My mother wrote this book. She did not want my voice; she wanted the beat of her own heart, her anxieties and laughter, her dreams and nightmares. She wanted her own voice. Brought up in poverty in a village in southern Lebanon, Kamila never had the opportunity to go to school, although she longed to. She was nine years old when she moved to Beirut and only eleven when her brothers tricked her into getting engaged to a man - her uncle, eighteen years her senior. Kamila was expected to be stone-bearing donkey - to live a domestic life. But it is the sounds, stories and imagery of poetry and films, and a beautiful boy called Muhammad, that fascinate Kamila. Muhanmmad is enchanted by her spirited and wily nature and they fall in love. Despite scratching, screaming, biting and crying, Kamila's battle against her arranged marriage is fruitless. At fourteen she is forced to marry and share her husband's bed. That night, her first daughter is conceived. Her second, Hanan, is born three years later. What follows is an incredible story of love and loss, tragedy, community and strength. Risking their lives Kamila and Muhammad continue to see each other in secret, sharing ideas, poetry and laughter. It takes eight years before Kamila can bring herself to divorce her husband, as to do so means abandoning her daughters. Evoking the dusty streets of Beirut and the fabric of life in Lebanon this is a remarkable and moving memoir about an extraordinary woman told with heartbreaking insight and raw honesty.

My Mother's Story

The Locust and the Bird

Only in London

Ḥanān Shaykh

In a novel that chronicles the modern Arab experience, four strangers, all with very different backgrounds, meet on a plane, each with their own motive for traveling to London.

One Thousand and One Nights are the never-ending stories told by Shahrazad under sentence of death to King Shahrayar. Maddened by the discovery of his wife's orgies, King Shahrayar vows to marry a virgin every night and kill her in the morning. To survive, his newest wife Shahrazad spins a web of tales each night, leaving the King in suspense when morning comes, prolonging her life for another day. Gathered from India, Persia and across the great Arab empire, these mesmerising stories tell of the real and the supernatural, love and marriage, power and punishment, wealth and poverty, and the endless trials and uncertainties of fate. Retold by Hanan al-Shaykh, One Thousand and One Nights are revealed in an intoxicating new voice.

One Thousand and One Nights

Nicholas Kulish

Kate Fowle

Daniel Atha

In Paperwork and the Will of Capital, Taryn Simon (born 1975)—one of the most original and challenging conceptual artists of our time—brings together geopolitics, horticultural science and the art of still life to investigate how the stagecraft of power is created, performed, marketed and maintained. At signings of political accords, contracts, treaties and decrees determining some of the gravest issues of our time, powerful men flank floral centerpieces curated to convey the importance of the signatories and represented institutions. Simon reconstituted and photographed the flower arrangements from archival images of key events; she then dried and pressed the flowers as herbarium specimens. This sumptuous book, part nature study, part metaphor, bears witness to an elaborate and intriguing process of artistic deconstruction and reconstruction. “These flowers sat between powerful men as they signed agreements designed to influence the fate of the world.” --Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon: Paperwork and the Will of Capital

At the intersection of tradition and modernity, East and West, childhood and adulthood, Hanan al-Shaykh's characters find their way through the shifting and ambiguous power relationships that shape the landscape of the modern Arab world. A woman feigns insanity to escape from an empty marriage, only to have her plans backfire; a young Danish missionary finds herself slowly and inexorably drawn into the world of the Yemeni village where she has been stationed; and a woman's lighthearted attempt to contact the world of the dead turns serious when she encounters the spirit of her late husband. At once clever and evocative, I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops is a collection of great insight, wit and poignancy, placing Hanan al-Shaykh among the foremost cosmopolitan writers of our time.

Stories

I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops

The Arab world's greatest folk stories re-imagined by the acclaimed Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, published to coincide with the world tour of a magnificent musical and theatrical production directed by Tim Supple

Hanan Al-Shaykh

Books

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