Amna, Nimo, Mouna - these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, climbs to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s; as a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo; a self-made divorcee and a lover; a 'pious mama' donning her hijab; and, finally, as a feminist activist during the Arab Spring.
Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister - who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years - in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.
Hallucinatory, stylish, and erotic, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Youssef Rakha is the rare writer who is actually paying attention and trying to make sense of the world while many are devolving into despair. The Dissenters creates a world outside the tinted windows of power, even if that means challenging the abyss." - Yuri Herrera
"The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lives set them on a collision course with Egypt's military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath." - Amitav Ghosh
"With thrilling prose and a narrative that flows as relentless as the Nile, Youssef Rakha takes us on the big dipper of Egyptian history from Nasser to now. The Dissenters is by turns haunted, horrifying, and hilarious." - Tim Mackintosh-Smith
"The Dissenters is the book of witnessing par excellence, telling not the story of just one woman or one Egypt, but rather of all of us who are of these geographies." - Salar Abdoh
"One of the most original and inventive writers of his generation." - Omar Robert Hamilton
Sprache
Verlagsort
Maße
Höhe: 193 mm
Breite: 124 mm
Dicke: 27 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-913512-67-5 (9781913512675)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
YOUSSEF RAKHA is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan's Seal, The Crocodiles, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.
