From a region rich in history, turmoil and reinvention here is a selection of the 10 Best Middle Eastern Books
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1. Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq)
From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S-occupied Baghdad, Hadi—a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café—collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive—first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path.
This prizewinning novel captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq. In 2018, his short story A Sense of Remorse was published in Baghdad Noir, the first ever anthology of crime fiction from Iraq to be published in English, as part of Akashic Books’ prestigious noir series.
2. Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
In Sugar Street, the final novel of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, change and tragedy continue for both the al-Jawad family and for Egypt as the height of the Great Depression gives way to a new European war and the terror of new weapons while independence for Egypt remains elusive.
Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.
3. The Secret Life of Saeed by Emile Habiby (Palestine)
Combining fact and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, Habiby’s story of a Palestinian who became a citizen of Israel is a contemporary classic.
Saeed the comic hero, the luckless fool, whose tale of aggression and resistance, terror and heroism, reason and loyalty typifies the hardships and struggles of Arabs in Israel. An informer for the Zionist state, his stupidity, candour and cowardice make him more of a victim than a villain; but in a series of tragi-comic episodes he is gradually transformed from a disaster-prone, gullible collaborator into a Palestinian – no hero still, but a simple man intent on survival and, perhaps, happiness.
4. More than I Love my Life by David Grossman (Israel)
Award-winning Israeli writer David Grossman’s More Than I Love My Life is a complex novel about the secrets that scar three generations of women for a lifetime.
Upon her 90th birthday, family matriarch Vera Novak reunites with her daughter, Nina, after five years of separation. Both Vera and Nina have committed the almost unpardonable act of abandoning young daughters—Vera when Nina was 6, and Nina when her own daughter, Gili, was even younger. The circumstances surrounding Vera’s and Nina’s departures are complex, slowly revealed and come to dominate all three women’s emotional lives.
5. Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa (Palestine)
Forcibly removed from the ancient village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejas are moved into the Jenin refugee camp. There, exiled from his beloved olive groves, the family patriarch languishes of a broken heart, and his grandchildren struggle against tragedy toward freedom, peace, and home.
6. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Turkey)
Mining questions of belonging, identity and trauma, Elif Shafak delivers a multi-layered, bittersweet tale of star-crossed love on the divided island of Cyprus and the legacy of secrecy and pain that gets handed down to future generations.
The Island of Missing Trees is a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal
7. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (Iran)
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov.
In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.
8. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (Iran)
The Blind Owl is a masterpiece of Persian literature—a tale of obsession and madness that chillingly re-creates the labyrinthine movements of a deranged mind.
A haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation, The Blind Owl tells the story of a young opium addict’s despair after losing a mysterious lover. Through a series of intricately woven events that revolve around the same set of mental images—an old man with a spine-chilling laugh, four cadaverous black horses with rasping coughs, a hidden urn of poisoned wine—the narrator is compelled to record his obsession with a beautiful woman even as it drives him further into frenzy and madness.
9. Beirut Nightmares by Ghada Samman (Syria)
Ghada Samman is a Syrian writer who lived in Beirut. Her novel Beirut Nightmares tells the story of a woman who is holed up in her house at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil war in 1975. Her only companions are her neighbors: an old man and his son, as well as their male servant. Instead of chapters, the novel progresses through 151 episodes that the author labels “Nightmare 1” and so on which are sometimes hallucinations, at other times actual nightmares, and still other times, realities nightmarish in nature.
10. Cities of Salt by Abdul Rahman Munif (Saudi Arabia)
The novel is a graphic and detailed account of the transformation of a fictional Gulf country (resembling Saudi Arabia) from a simple Bedouin life into an oil-producing state governed, albeit indirectly, and exploited by American oil companies. It records the shattering of people’s lives and the violation of their own traditions. Driven out of their simple homes and tents, the people watch their villages being leveled to the ground while American ports and cities are erected in their place.
If you enjoyed our selection of the Best Middle Eastern Books to Read,check out our profile of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare
