A01=Mai Al-Nakib
Arab
Author_Mai Al-Nakib
belonging
boundaries
Category=FBA
Category=FYB
childhood
coming-of-age
connection
culture
diaspora
discovery
displacement
emotions
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
exile
family
feminist
generational ties
growth
heritage
history
home
hope
identity
inner lives
innocence
intimacy
Kuwait
longing
loss
modern fiction
nostalgia
personal journeys
perspective
recovery
reflection
relationships
resilience
secrets
short stories
silence
societal change
survival
tradition
transformation
trauma
United States
war
Product details
- ISBN 9781849250856
- Weight: 250g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 05 Jun 2025
- Publisher: Saqi Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived – adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib’s luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people – and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.
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 literature from Brown University and is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Kuwait University. Her academic research focuses on cultural politics in the Middle East, with a special emphasis on gender, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonial issues. Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. It won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2014 First Book Award, the first collection of short stories to do so. Her debut novel, An Unlasting Home, was published in the US by Mariner Books-HarperCollins in April 2022, and in the UK by Saqi books in April 2023.
