A severely injured nineteen-year-old soldier caught at the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War tries to piece together his life as he waits for aid that may never arrive. As he inches toward death, he recalls the minor and major events of his life and his country that led him so close to death. Told in vignettes that jump across time and place, Samar Yazbek’s newest novel Where The Wind Calls Home is a heart-wrenching story that questions the value of life in a combat zone with equal parts compassion and anger to craft a brilliant war novel. Translated from Arabic by Leri Price, Yazbek’s story introduces English readers to a moment in Syrian history that is equally haunting and beautiful.
Middle East
Moving on from the theme of communication examined in her last novel, Bitter Orange Tree, International Booker-prize winner Jokha Alharthi turns her exacting focus and lyrical style to marriage and motherhood in contemporary Oman. Sensitively translated to reflect Alharthi’s ability to switch seamlessly between the different voices of her two central characters, one pragmatic, one passionate, the story also touches on the constraints and expectations of Omani society where traditional beliefs persist despite rapid modernization.
The Mesopotamian high priestess Enheduana lived over 4,000 years ago, but her words ring down to the present: “I am Enheduana.”
It can come as a surprise that the largest Muslim (or perhaps more accurately, Muslim-majority) country is Indonesia, far from the religion’s origins in the Middle East. It is—probably as a result—not always included, or at least not centrally, in discourse about Islam. James M Dorsey, on the other hand, puts the country front and center in his new book The Battle for the Soul of Islam.
Those who have come of age since the 1973 oil embargo should have no great difficulty accepting the outsized importance of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region. From oil and gas to, more recently, airlines, finance, media and football teams, the countries of the Gulf have influence that far exceeds traditional measurements of power such as population or military capacity. In Center of the World, Allen James Fromherz argues that this importance dates to the dawn of history.
In Sheela Tomy’s new novel, the foreign observer of Israel and Palestine is not the archetypal Westerner, but a middle-aged Indian woman. Translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S, Do Not Ask The River Her Name weaves the past and future into a blood-filled present to tell an emotional and urgent tale.
The Middle East remains one of the world’s most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region’s history for the past several decades.
As current events in Palestine, Iraq, and the Red Sea attest, the Middle East is a region with much unrest, instability and conflict. However, the region is undergoing a new era of turmoil and transition, headlined by Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf States. As a journalist and author with decades of experience in covering geopolitics around the world, Robert D Kaplan sheds some light on this transition in a sweeping and insightful overview of the Muslim world from Egypt to Iran to Central Asia, which he terms the Greater Middle East.
For almost seven centuries, two powers dominated the region we now call the Middle East: Rome and Persia. From the west: The Roman Republic, later the Roman Empire, later the Byzantine Empire. From the East: The Parthian Empire, later replaced by the Sassanian Empire. The two ancient superpowers spent centuries fighting for influence, paying each other off, encouraging proxy fights in their neighbors, and seizing opportunities while the other was distracted with internal strife. The relationship culminates in an almost-three-decade long war that so exhausts the two powers that they both end up getting overrun by the Arabs years later.
Savyon Liebrecht’s novel, The Bridesman, opens with the narrator on a flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. It’s been twenty-four years since Micha left Israel for the United States and he’s heading back on an all-expenses-paid invitation from his beloved aunt Adella. Liebrecht’s novel, translated from the Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann, is a short book that tells the story of a tightly-knit Persian Jewish family that almost becomes the undoing of Adella two decades earlier. Micha does not know exactly why his aunt calls him back to Israel and how she can afford to pay his way, but he will by the end of the book.
You must be logged in to post a comment.