book cover of The Hidden Light of Objects
 

The Hidden Light of Objects

(2014)
A collection of stories by

 
 
For fans of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore.
A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country's growing hostility towards the West. A self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two belligerent classmates. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. A Kuwaiti woman returns to her family after being held captive in Iraq for a decade.

The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you may see life in the Middle East as it is really lived - adolescent love, yearnings for independence, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories carefully unveil the lives of ordinary people in the Middle East - and the power of ordinary objects to hold extraordinary memories.


Genre: Literary Fiction

Praise for this book

"The old world and the new. The strife in the Gulf, once peaceful and reflective. East and West, Arabic and English, the poetry of the heart, the eye of the hawk; all these elements produce the lustrous pearls of Mai Al-Nakib's short stories." - Hanan Al-Shaykh

"The most original first collection of short fiction I have read in years." - Manette Ansay

"The Hidden Light of Objects brings forth both the light and the shadows of the contemporary Middle East in clean-edged prose that startles us, not with sudden violence or polemic, but with the ineluctable force of human desire. Kuwait itself becomes a character, full of contradictions, in this multifaceted set of stories and vignettes. Superb." - Lucy Ferriss


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