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English edition
Nov
2011
192 pp.
Hardbound
15X23 cm
$22.95
LE 120.00
ISBN
978 977 416 488 0
For sale only in the Middle East and North America
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Brooklyn Heights
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Miral al-Tahawy
Translated by
Samah Selim
Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, shortlisted for the 2011 Arabic Booker prize
Hind, newly arrived in New York with her eight-year-old son, several suitcases of unfinished manuscripts, and hardly any English, finds a room in a Brooklyn teeming with people like her who dream of becoming writers.
As she discovers the various corners of her new home, they conjure up parallel memories from her childhood and her small Bedouin village in the Nile Delta: Emilia who sells used shoes at the flea market smells like Zeinab, the old woman who worked for Hind’s grandfather; the reflection of her own body as she dances tango awakens the awkwardness of her relationship to that body across the years; the story of Lilette, the Egyptian bourgeoise who has lost her memory, prompts Hind to safeguard her own.
Through this kaleidoscopic spectrum of disadvantaged characters we encounter unique but familiar life histories in this award-winning and intensely moving novel of displacement and exile.
Miral al-Tahawy is the author of The Tent (AUC Press, 1998) and Blue Aubergine (AUC Press, 2002).
Samah Selim is the translator of Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl by Mohamed Makhzangi (AUC Press, 2006). She won the 2009 Saif Gobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for her translation of The Collar and the Bracelet (AUC Press, 2008).
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Reviews
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“Brooklyn Heights is memorable, not only for giving voice to marginal, oppressed, sometimes silent female characters but for evoking a vanishing world of those forced to leave their homeland. It is filled with the ‘winds of longing’ and distinctive scents.”—Al-Ahram Weekly
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