An Unlasting Home
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she recognises less and less. Yet since her return from the States eleven years earlier, a certain inertia has kept her there. When she is accused of blasphemy, which carries with it the threat of execution, Sara realises she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all. Awaiting trial, Sara retraces the past, intent on examining the lives of the women who made her. She conjures forth her grandmothers - beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in Kuwait and later swept off to India by her wealthy merchant husband. An Unlasting Home brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable family portrait and a spellbinding epic tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sweeping debut novel from Al-Nakib (after the collection The Hidden Light of Objects) imagines an alternate reality for contemporary Kuwait in which blasphemy is made a capital crime. Sara, a professor of philosophy at Kuwait University, has been accused of blasphemy by one of her students. The offending lesson was on Nietzsche; according to her lawyer, the text's Arabic translation "sounds even more damning" than the original. She examines why she returned to Kuwait 11 years earlier after so many years away, most recently in Berkeley, Calif. Part of it was to be closer to the spirit of her late mother. She also considers how previous generations of her family endured their country's painful draconian rule. Alternating chapters skip between Sara's present dilemma and the difficult choices her great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents made as they moved to Turkey, Iraq, India, and the U.S., only to find themselves ever again Kuwaitis. Al-Nakib renders each family member with care and exacting observation. As Sara's verdict looms, this grapples profoundly with the limits of individual choice and the hold exerted by a person's homeland. The result is accomplished and searing.
