An Unlasting Home

Mai Al-Nakib author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Saqi Books

Published:4th Apr '23

Should be back in stock very soon

An Unlasting Home cover

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.

'A spellbinding family history unfolds as a Kuwaiti woman goes on trial for blasphemy in a world gone mad. Deftly written, structurally brilliant, Mai Al-Nakib's An Unlasting Home is a lasting novel that splits open time, leaps across continents and creates the sort of characters we carry forward into our hearts and lives. I absolutely loved this book.'

-- A. Manette Ansay

'So fresh and unsettling that it will enchant you from the first page and linger for days after reading ... Deftly written ... Its epic family saga style echoes that of Hala Alyan's Salt Houses and The Arsonists' City, Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies, and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko.'

* Los Angeles Review of Books *

'For lovers of sweeping, multigenerational epics like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing or Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, this story following three generations of Arab women will strike right at the heart.'

* Bitch Med

ISBN: 9780863569272

Dimensions: 218mm x 136mm x 27mm

Weight: 382g

400 pages