The hidden light of objects
By: Mai Al-Nakib
Publisher: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Doha, Qatar
Language: eng
Number of pages: 237
ISBN-13: 9789992195413
Subjects: Fiction
Description: For fans of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. 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 may see life in the Middle East as it is really lived - adolescent love, yearnings for independence, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories carefully unveil the lives of ordinary people in the Middle East - and the power of ordinary objects to hold extraordinary memories.