Selected North African Womens Fiction
Explore a curated selection of North African women's fiction, featuring powerful stories and voices from acclaimed female authors. Discover must-read books that celebrate culture, identity, and resilience.
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Wounding Words
by Evelyne Accad
Poetical and powerful, Wounding Words is a vivid autobiographical exploration of women's issues in the political turmoil of contemporary Tunisia.
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The Open Door
by Latifa Al-Zayyat
This novel explores a middle-class Egyptian girl's coming of sexual and political age, in the context of the Egyptian nationalist movement preceding the 1952 revolution. It traces the pressures on young men and women of that time and class as they soughtto be free of family control.
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the tiller of waters
by hoda barakat
This spellbinding novel narrates the many-layered recollections of a hallucinating man in devastated Beirut. The desolate, almost surreal, urban landscape is enriched by the unfolding of the family sagas of Niqula Mitri and his beloved Shamsa, the Kurdish maid. Mitri reminisces about his Egyptian mother and his father who came back to settle in Beirut after a long stay in Egypt. Both Mitri and his father are textile merchants and see the world through the code of cloth, from the intimacy of linen, velvet, and silk to the most impersonal of synthetics. Shamsa in turn relates her story, the myriad adventures of her parents and grandparents who moved from Iraqi Kurdistan to Beirut. Haunting scenes of pastoral Kurds are juxtaposed against the sedentary decadence of metropolitan residents. Barakat weaves into her sophisticated narrative shreds of scientific discourse about herbal plants and textile crafts, customs and manners of Arabs, Armenians, and Kurds, mythological figures from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, and Arabia, the theosophy of the African Dogons and the medieval Byzantines, and historical accounts of the Crusades in the Holy Land and the silk route to China.
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Children of the New World
by Assia Djebar
A compelling war novel, as seen by women, sheds light on the current Iraq conflict.
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The Abductor
by Leïla Marouane
"Nayla Zeitoun has just been told by her son that she has become a grandmother. In his excitement he lets out a small secret about the child, and she flies out of the house with a handful of salt to dispel the evil eye. Her daughters are astonished as she has never left the house before without a man of the family beside her. When Mr. Zeitoun hears that she has gone out, he is so angry that he repudiates her three times and so breaks the marriage. He regrets his action at once but according to Islamic law he can only remarry her if she marries and is divorced by someone else first. He persuades an unassuming neighbor to take her as his wife and then divorce her. He thinks he has taken care of things according to the laws of God and society, but events take an unexpected turn."--Jacket.
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The Sandwoman
by Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska
The author's feminism is subtle. She understands that repression imprisons men as well as women... But although the mirror she holds up is clouded, it does provide a fascinating reflection.
