The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer
Belal Fadl author Osama Hammad translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Dar Arab
Publishing:15th Dec '25
£14.00
This title is due to be published on 15th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A darkly comic coming-of-age tale from 1990s Cairo, where survival, satire and storytelling collide.
A darkly comic coming-of-age tale set in 1990s Cairo, where one young man’s search for art, freedom, and belonging leads him into the strangest household imaginable.
When a seventeen-year-old flees his violent father and heads to Cairo to chase his dream of breaking into the arts, he ends up in a crumbling flat with a mercurial landlady and her volatile son. Set in the early 1990s, The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer is a sharply observed, darkly comic coming-of-age novel about ambition, survival, and the strange intimacies forged by necessity. Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this cult-favourite debut by Egyptian screenwriter, journalist, and satirist Belal Fadl appears in English for the first time, in a vivid translation by Osama Hammad.
"A darkly hilarious, devastatingly sharp portrait of Cairo’s underclass in the 1990s. Belal Fadl writes with such verve and vividness that even the most absurd moments feel heartbreakingly real."—Abdelhadi Hreiba, Writer and Cultural Critic
“In Um Mimi, Belal Fadl breaks free of euphemism and restraint to deliver a raw, obscene, and hilarious vision of a world where power means exploitation and survival depends on complicity. It’s a coming-of-age story that reeks of filth, sorrow, and brutal truth.” —Ahmed Naji, Bidayat, Issue 33, Spring 2023
- Long-listed for International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2022 (Egypt)
ISBN: 9781788711142
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown