Other Lives
1st Edition
Published on 19. June 2014
256 pages
978-1-62371-049-1 (ISBN)
Description
A new novel from award-winning Lebanese writer Iman Humaydan. "Did I live many lives or only one life enough for many women?" asks Miriyam in Other Lives. This third novel by Lebanese writer, Iman Humaydan, starkly and poignantly demonstrates how war, violence and dislocation have an impact not only on the lives of people who live through them but what life itself means, particularly for women. In Other Lives, Miriyam's travels take her from her Shouf mountain village to Beirut, Melbourne and Paradise, Australia to Nairobi, Mombasa and Cape Town. Unwilling to be tied down by geography, language or men, Miriyam forges a path through the world that is at once hers uniquely and also deeply informed by her life's experiences. Again and again, she is drawn back to the Lebanon of her birth and childhood, only to find it no longer there. She is forced to confront the ghosts of the civil war?her dead brother, her disappeared lover, and the life that she left behind when she immigrated to Australia. Humaydan deftly explores one woman's negotiation of love and war, intimacy and loss, migration and home in a way that speaks beyond individual but to a collective experience.
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Person
Iman Humaydan Younes is a Lebanese novelist and freelance journalist. Her first novel Baa Mithl Beit Mithl Beirut (B for Bait for Beirut) received wide international acclaim and was translated into English, French and German. Wild Mulberries is her second novel. Her third novel, Haywat Okhra (Other Lives), will be released in Beirut in 2008 by Al Massar. Many of her short stories appeared in the cultural pages of Lebanese and Arabic newspapers and magazines such as Mulhak An Nahar, As Safir, Al Hasna'a, and Sayidati. Younes studied anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She wrote Neither Here Nor There: Narratives of the Families of the Disappeared in Lebanon and conducted and published studies on environmental and development issues of post-war Lebanon. Michelle Hartman is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Language at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Her main area of research is Modern Arabic Literature, specializing in Lebanese women's writing. She is the translator (with Maher Barakat) of Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib's acclaimed novel Just Like a River.
Content
- Intro
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedicate
- Other Lives
- Backcover
