In mysterious circumstances, the body of Zakaria Mubarak is found at the boundary of his village, Tel Safra. He had just returned from a long exile in Europe, America and Africa, carrying with him a painting by Marc Chagall, the “Blue Violinist”, a gift from his girlfriend in Paris. Suspicion falls on the cousins who may have killed him to get a treasure supposedly buried underneath the house built by their grandmother when she came back from America. This absorbing novel tells the story of Zakaria’s murder, intersected with fables of gold, sibling strife, the love of French women, the fake promise of revolution and sectarian enmities which have been flaring up from time to time in Lebanon for the last 150 years. Beirut, Dar al-Saqi 2019.
The Tank explores the relationship between human beings and places which have been taken away from them. After four decades of exile, the writer imagines her return to Iraq and begins her journey of observing the huge changes experienced by the country and society. It is a literary return with a tragic undertone, and interwoven with the text is the life of the writer who has shared with her characters the upheavals which have shaken her homeland.
The Russian Quarter tells the story of a neighbourhood which for many years resists being dragged into the war going on around it, but is finally compelled to get involved. However, it enters the war with stories rather than weapons. Some of the book’s characters are a giraffe from the zoo, a poodle, a female Afghan hound and a sparrow made of wool. Its human ones include the narrator, a translator living in the zoo in the Russian quarter; Victor Ivanitch, a Russian former journalist and now manager of the zoo; Abu Ali Suleiman, French teacher and owner of a clothes shop; ‘Isam, a popular hero working in a cabaret; Rashida from Morocco, former oud player in the cabaret; Arkady Kuzmitch, a little-known Russian writer; and Nuna, daughter of a clarinet player, who knits wool and lives with the narrator in the zoo, and many others…