- Home
- FICTION
- General & Literary Fiction
- Against the Loveless World
You must sign in to add this item to your wishlist. Please sign in or create an account
Description
Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them.
The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist, and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahr has always been many things, and had many names.
She was named for the river her pregnant mother crossed when she fled from Palestine, but her feckless father called her Yaqoot, Ruby. For a time when she came of age she was Almas, Diamond, a girl who went to hidden parties in Kuwait with powerful men, who sold off parts of herself to keep her family together. She was a girl who learned, early and painfully, that when you are a second class citizen love is a kind of desperation; she learned, above all else, to survive.
She was a girl who went to Palestine in the wrong shoes, and without looking for it found what she had always lacked in the basement of a battered beauty parlour: purpose, politics, friends. She found a dark-eyed man called Bilal, who taught her to resist; who tried to save her when it was already too late.
Nahr sits in the Cube, and tells her story to Bilal. Bilal, who isn't there; Bilal, who may not even be alive, but who is her only reason to get out.
Product details
| Published | 23 Jul 2020 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 384 |
| ISBN | 9781526618788 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
-
The writer's pain - and the beauty of her prose – are very real
Daily Telegraph
-
One of the most thought-provoking books I've read ... written with passion and honesty, and poetry
Daily Mail
-
Abulhawa's writing shines ... Friendship, adolescence, love: ordinary events, offset against extraordinary circumstances, make the story live
Independent
-
Hard to bear but impossible to ignore … Shows how history's assault on each person is public, and how it nevertheless cannot extinguish the private experience of grief or the secret sense of eros. Abulhawa's vision is precise, courageous, and dazzling
Teju Cole
-
In true Thousand and One Nights style, Abulhawa surprises us by continually unfolding new stories … Characters struggle to keep their secrets, but Abulhawa releases them. These are secrets we need to know, secrets that will educate us about ourselves
Guardian
-
A transformative literary grace. Abulhawa's prose is luminous
Independent on Sunday

























