Slipping
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
There are shards of magic to be found on every page of this novel.” —Omar El Akkad, author of American War
A struggling journalist named Seif is introduced to a former exile with an encyclopedic knowledge of Egypt’s obscure, magical places. Together, as explorer and guide, they step into the fragmented, elusive world the Arab Spring left behind. They trek to an affluent neighborhood where giant corpse flowers rain from the sky. They join an anonymous crowd in the dark, hallucinating together before a bare cave wall. They descend a set of stairs to the spot along the Nile River where, it’s been said, you can walk on water. But what begins as a fantastical excursion through a splintered nation quickly winds its way inward as Seif begins to piece together the trauma of his own past, including what happened to Alya, his lover with the remarkable ability to sing any sound: crashing waves, fluttering wings, a roaring inferno.
Musical and parabolic, Slipping seeks nothing less than to accept the world in all its mystery. An innovative novel that searches for meaning within the haze of trauma, it generously portrays the overlooked miracles of everyday life, and attempts to reconcile past failures—both personal and societal—with a daunting future. Delicately translated from Arabic by Robin Moger, this is a profound introduction to the imagination of Mohamed Kheir, one of the most exciting writers working in Egypt today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Egyptian writer Kheir's enchanting English-language debut follows a journalist and a tour guide full of fantastical stories through a series of strange locations. The story unfolds in Cairo and nearby Egyptian towns during the Arab Spring, when grief-stricken, ennui-ridden magazine writer Seif, whose girlfriend, Alya, was recently killed during a protest, is assigned to accompany Bahr on excursions to unfamiliar places. Bahr leads Seif to an Alexandrian site where two streetcar trains narrowly miss striking them, and later shows him how to appear to walk on water at the Nile (it's an illusion, as an upriver floodgate's closure drops the water level). Along the way, Bahr tells of a befuddled soon-to-be groom who wakes in a garbage-ridden trench in an unfamiliar neighborhood after missing his wedding three days earlier, among other stories. Bahr's tales trigger memories in Seif—such as one about a man whose father dies and whose mother began receiving messages from the dead man, and another about flowers falling from the sky, which reminds Seif of being separated on the street from Alya before she was killed—and soon his sense of reality becomes increasingly blurred. Throughout, Kheir demonstrates a marvelous imagination and harnesses the magic of storytelling. Readers are in for a treat.
