Category Archives: Radwa Ashour
Ashour, Radwa. Siraaj: An Arab Tale 2007. Austin, University of Texas, USA.
This is a slim volume and a seemingly simple story of a baker working for a despotic sultan on an island off East Africa at end of the 1800s. Amina´s husband was lost at sea so she waits anxiously for her son, Said, to return from a long voyage. He does return and is full of the history he has witnessed. He has been to Egypt, lived there with Egyptians and has witnessed the British invasion of Alexandria.
The fictitious island, set near Zanzibar, is a small lush fiefdom of a fabulously wealthy sultan with a castle full of Arabic servants and Read more [...]
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Ashour, Radwa. Granada. # 1 of a trilogy 2003. Syracuse University Press, USA
There is a rich body of literature in Arabic; English readers are deprived of much of it by our disinterest and our historic political antagonism both to Arabic culture and our debt to it. We rarely have access to modern Arabic fiction in translation, particularly by women, so it is an unusual treat to read two books by this contemporary Egyptian writer and academic. Her books are not dry or academic but bold novels with strong characters whose lives and actions are lovingly detailed with daily life meshed into unfolding history.
This is the Read more [...]
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