Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English
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Fiction & Related items

THE PHILISTINE

Leila Marshy

Nadia Eid doesn't know it yet, but she's about to change her life. It's the end of the '80s and she hasn't seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him. But now she's twenty-five and he's missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Québecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo. But nothing goes as planned and, stumbling around, Nadia wanders into an art gallery where she meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist who becomes first her guide and then her lover. Through this unexpected relationship, Nadia rediscovers her roots, her language, and her ambitions, as her father demonstrates the unavoidable destiny of becoming a Philistine - the Arabic word for Palestinian. With Manal's career poised to take off and her father's secret life revealed, the First Intifada erupts across the border. Nadia needs to decide what all this has to do with her.

Montrealer Leila Marshy is of Palestinian-Newfoundland heritage. She has been a filmmaker, an artisanal baker, a mobile app designer, a marketer, a farmer, a political campaign manager, and editor of online culture journal Rover Arts. She founded the Friends of Hutchison Street, a groundbreaking community group bringing Hasidic and non-Hasidic neighbours together in dialogue. She has published stories and poetry in Canadian and American journals and anthologies. The Philistine is her first novel.

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Book Published 2018-03-01 by Linda Leith Publishing

Comments

Leila Marshy beautifully captures what it's like to be at once deeply rooted and displaced, fiercely committed to truth, while enabling the lies that lovers tell. A sweet and bitter coming-of-age story that spans and transgresses sexuality, culture, and countries. (Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of Fall on Your Knees, The Way the Crow Flies)

@cbcHomerun we raved about Leila Marshy's novel The Philistine a beautifully written novel set in Cairo. Readers will love Nadia as she navigates the Cairine art scene on a voyage of self-discovery. (RIchard King of CBC on Twitter)

Marshy covers a lot of ground, from the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Palestine Red Crescent Society's list of injured Palestinians to a tourist's view of the Pyramids. But the push-pull claims of identity dominate the novel. Marshy captures the dissonance of Nadia's feelings being at home with Egyptian culture yet simultaneously guilty for her lack of fluency in Arabic... Despite the passionate love affair between Nadia and Manal, the novel keeps its emotions in check. What The Philistine does, instead, is address themes of identity, sexuality, dispossession, and privilege with care and sensitivity. Read more...

Shortlist, the Kobo Emerging Writers Prize, literary fiction category Read more...

Set against the backdrop of Hosni Mubarak's regime and the first Intifada, Marshy's is a bittersweet story of barriers and restrictions, which ones can only bend for now and which ones can break. Read more...

Nadia's recognition that her sexuality is more fluid than she had previously understood reinforces that perhaps everything about her is likewise mutable. Marshy's controlled prose underscores this complexity: I guess I'll stay in Cairo as long as it takes.' Then [Nadia] added, realizing it could be anything: Whatever it is.' The beauty of The Philistine is the novel's ability to recognize and celebrate journeying across places and into one's self, even when the destination is perpetually shifting. Read more...