| Vendor | |
|---|---|
|
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
THE DISSENTERS
Told from the perspective of her son Nour, The Dissenters is the story of the life and suicide of a Francophone Egyptian woman named Amna Abu Zahra.
Conservative and depressed in her later life, Amna is in her early seventies when the January Revolution breaks out in Tahrir Square, and has a transformative, galvanizing effect on her sense of agency. She sheds her religiosity and becomes an advocate for democratic change, but as disillusionment with the way events turn out takes root, she embraces the mysterious, silent protest that millions of other women have been staging by jumping off a Cairo rooftop to her eventual death.
Framed as a letter to Nour's San Jose-based sister Shaima, the novel is made up of alternate chapters, each focusing on a day in Amna's life. They deal, respectively, with her biography from the birth of republican Egypt in the mid-fifties to the Arab Spring, and her experience of the revolution and its aftermath in 2011-2015. As the story unfolds, Amna's fascinating struggle not just for survival financial, social, psychological but also for personal emancipation begins to come across as a fractal of Egyptian history, and the strange phenomenon of women jumping out of windows and off rooftops to their death emerges as a metaphor for Egyptianness as well as womanhood in this part of the world.
Youssef Rakha is a novelist, poet, essayist and journalist who writes in both Arabic and English. Born, raised and based in Cairo, Youssef graduated from Hull University, England. His writing is featured in many web and print publications including The Atlantic, BOMB, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, and The New York Times. His work has prompted appearances in events across the world, including the Hay Festival in the UK (2011), the Ritratti di Poesia in Rome (2015), the Internationales Literaturfestival Leukerbad in Switzerland (2016), La Comédie du livre in Montpellier, France (2017), and Dubai's Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature's anniversary round (2018). He has judged film as well as writing competitions, and is on the jury of the True Story Award.
Framed as a letter to Nour's San Jose-based sister Shaima, the novel is made up of alternate chapters, each focusing on a day in Amna's life. They deal, respectively, with her biography from the birth of republican Egypt in the mid-fifties to the Arab Spring, and her experience of the revolution and its aftermath in 2011-2015. As the story unfolds, Amna's fascinating struggle not just for survival financial, social, psychological but also for personal emancipation begins to come across as a fractal of Egyptian history, and the strange phenomenon of women jumping out of windows and off rooftops to their death emerges as a metaphor for Egyptianness as well as womanhood in this part of the world.
Youssef Rakha is a novelist, poet, essayist and journalist who writes in both Arabic and English. Born, raised and based in Cairo, Youssef graduated from Hull University, England. His writing is featured in many web and print publications including The Atlantic, BOMB, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, and The New York Times. His work has prompted appearances in events across the world, including the Hay Festival in the UK (2011), the Ritratti di Poesia in Rome (2015), the Internationales Literaturfestival Leukerbad in Switzerland (2016), La Comédie du livre in Montpellier, France (2017), and Dubai's Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature's anniversary round (2018). He has judged film as well as writing competitions, and is on the jury of the True Story Award.
| Available products |
|---|
|
Book
Published by Graywolf |