The Hidden Light of Objects - by Mai Al-Nakib (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived - adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people - and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.

Review Quotes

'With her compassion for an old, vanished world and her exceptional eye for the bruised landscape of the modern Middle East, Al-Nakib- should be heralded as an exciting new literary voice.' --The National

'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

'Al-Nakib writes with penetrating insight and such compressed lyricism that at times her prose seems to border on poetry. It's a densely imagined and beautifully written debut.' --The Sydney Morning Herald

'Through a richly nuanced and generous lens, Al-Nakib's gracefully intertwined stories celebrate the living desire that connects us to home - wherever in the world that might be - as well as to the past and to each other. A powerful voice already in full mastery of her powers. The most original first collection of short fiction I have read in years.' --A. Manette Ansay

'Mai Al-Nakib's 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

About the Author

Mai Al-Nakib is the author of An Unlasting Home (Saqi Books, 2023). Her short stories have appeared in publications including 'Ninth Letter', 'The First Line', 'After the Pause' and World Literature Today. The Hidden Light of Objects won the Edinburgh International Book Festival's First Book Award in 2014. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and teaches English and comparative literature at Kuwait University.