Banipal Books

The Cinderellas of Muscat

Paperback • eBook • 224pp

FORTHCOMING IN MAY

During the modernisation of Muscat, the female jinn disappear.  Missing their playfulness Zubayda and seven friends decide to recover the jinn's mysterious powers, and once a month transform themselves into Cinderellas to tell their secret stories in Chef Ramon’s restaurant on Muscat’s beach front.

At Rest in the Cherry Orchard

Paperback • eBook • 224pp

Iraqi Said Jensen, living in Norway, is haunted continually by the ghost of his father, killed by the Saddam Hussein regime before he was born, and frequent nightmare hallucinations. Called urgently back to Baghdad, where a mass grave, hopefully holding his father’s remains, will be opened, he remembers the peaceful cherry orchard where his neighbour Jakob was laid to rest.

The Secrets of Folder 42

Pbk • eBook • 368pp

Abdelmajid Sebbata’s thriller-cum-jigsaw puzzle of a novel sets puzzles and riddles for the reader to solve as well as the protagonists of the two storylines. They weave their way across continents and through historical events to a spectacular conclusion, in spite of the author’s laptop and notebook having been left behind in a taxi. 

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Knife Sharpener

Pbk • 154pp  • £9.99 • Reprint

These Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Sargon Boulus himself before his untimely passing, are a commemoration and celebration of him and his influential work. Plus tributes to him and a photographic memorial after he tragically passed away while the book was in progress

Shadow of the Sun

Pbk • eBook • 192pp

Impoverished Egyptian teacher Helmy is desperate to find a better life for himself, his wife and little boy, seeing no future at home in Cairo. He dreams of working in oil-rich Kuwait and its boom in construction being the answer. He manages to borrow the huge cost of a visa and is at last on his way to Kuwait, but has no idea of the hellish nightmare that awaits him.

Birds of Nabaa

Pbk • eBook • 192pp

An unforgettable journey into the music, song and poetry of Mauritania that follows the narrator across continents and back to his natal village of Nabaa, along with the diverse friends and characters he meets up with, even as premonitions of disaster from drought resound around him.

The Stone Serpent, Barates of Palmyra’s Elegy for Regina his Beloved – An Eastern Serenade

Pbk • eBook • 112pp

A single line in Aramaic on a Roman tombstone at Hadrian's Wall inspired this epic elegy of two extraordinary lovers, Barates of Palmyra, and Regina, the Celtic slave he freed and married, but who died aged only 30.

Things I Left Behind

Pbk • eBook • 144pp
Things I Left Behind is young Palestinian author Shada Mustafa’s debut novel – a free-flowing narrative that interrogates, in short, direct sentences, the memories of growing up, the trauma of her parents' divorce, the Qalandia checkpoint, falling in love, that keep forcing themselves out to be reckoned with.

The Tent Generations, Palestinian Poems

Pbk • eBook • 160pp

The Tent Generationsm, Palestinian Poems adds an urgent poetic dimension to our understanding of the still unfolding history of the Palestinian people, whether dispersed from their homeland into the diaspora, or enduring or living under Israeli rule and occupation.

Sarajevo Firewood

Pbk • eBook • 320pp

Sarajevo Firewood explores in fictional form the recent histories of two entwined countries, Algeria and Bosnia and Herzegovina, both suffering traumatic and devastating civil wars in the 1990s. A lasting memorial to the thousands of dead and ‘disappeared’ of both countries and those who were forced to flee.

The Madness of Despair

Pbk • Hbk • eBook • 256pp

Living in London, Nafie and his young wife Maliha become good friends with fellow exile Doctor Nadim, with unforeseen consequences for them all. A powerful narrative of psychological suffering and cultural displacement that upsets the very ordinary aspirations for life and love.

Fadhil Al-Azzawi's Beautiful Creatures

Pbk • Hbk • eBook • 152pp

This work, first published in Arabic in 1969 to great acclaim, and now for the first time in English translation, was written in defiance of the “sanctity of genre” and to raise the question of freedom of expression in writing. 

Poems of Alexandria and New York

Paperback  •  ebook  •  126pp

Ahmed Morsi’s first volume in English translation captures the modernity and empathy at the heart of all his works, his surrealistic humour, and his visions of the dramas of ordinary life.

Mansi A Rare Man in His Own Way

Paperback • eBook • 184pp

"A flavourful and entertaining memoir of his friendship with a shape-shifting, rule-breaking character" – Boyd Tonkin

The Mariner

Paperback • eBook • 160pp

Taleb Alrefai turns a spotlight on Kuwait’s pearl-fishing history in this enthralling fictional re-telling of the day the country’s famous shipmaster Captain Al-Najdi was lost at sea.

Goat Mountain

Paperback • eBook • 92pp
Both formats available now

"This intense, glacial fantasy is the work of a literary master. At a subliminal level, it can be read as the intellectual’s despairing and suicidal attack on inhuman political power" – James Kirkup

A Boat to Lesbos

Paperback • 120pp • £9.99
Illustrated with 20 paintings by Reem Yassouf
First collection in English translation for Syrian poet Nouri Al-Jarrah. Translated from the Arabic by Camilo Gómez-Rivas and Allison Blecker.

An Iraqi In Paris

Paperback • 282pp • £9.99

A fully revised third edition in translation of this best-selling ‘gem of autobiographical writing’ in the Arab world, by an author who has been called ‘a relentless raconteur’, ‘a modern Odysseus’, ‘the Iraqi Don Quixote’.

Shepherd of Solitude

186pp • £7.95 • $15
Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

Shepherd of Solitude is the first English collection for Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser, translated and introduced by the foremost translator of contemporary Arabic poetry, with the poems selected by poet and translator from the poet's Arabic volumes of 1979 to 2004.

Heavenly Life

180pp  •  £7.99 • €12 • $15
Selected Poems

First English-language collection for Ramsey Nasr, then Poet Laureate of the Netherlands. 
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. Introduction by Victor Schiferli and Foreword by Ruth Padel

“With this collection Anglophone readers are introduced to a poet of global scope" – Marilyn Hacker

Mordechai's Moustache and his Wife's Cats, and other stories

Paperback • 124 pages • £7.99

The brilliantly observed clutter and comedy of everyday lives pushed up against an iron occupation and fighting for survival . . .

• Click here for the title story Mordechai's Moustache and his Wife's Cats

A Retired Gentleman, and other stories

Paperback • 120 pages • £7.99 • $15
From Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. George, Kamal, Mayy, Abdullah, Nadia, William, all have to begin their lives again, learn how to deal with their memories, with their pasts . . .

Sardines and Oranges

Paperback • 222pp • £8.99 • $15

Short Stories from North Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia

Includes new works by authors well-known in the West – Tayeb Salih from Sudan, Mohamed Choukri from Morocco

The Myrtle Tree

Paperback • 288 pages • £9.99 • $15

Enthralling and timely saga, set in a small Lebanese village, of a young family's attempt to thwart the onset of civil war

Unbuttoning the Violin

Paperback • 128pp • £3.95

Poems and short stories by four young Arab authors celebrating their tour of the UK August 2006 with Banipal Live, a partnership of Banipal magazine with the British Council and The Reading Agency.