Our top five books of the month take in Brooklyn, Iraq, the West Bank, the Congo, Argentina, and a dystopian otherworld. Together, these stories explore a central question: What happens to a person when their home is no longer a safe place?
Notes From a Lost Country by Sinan Antoon
Translated by the author
The work of Iraqi poet, novelist and scholar, Sinan Antoon, navigates the intersections of memory, war and realities of exile. Notes From a Lost Country captures the visceral experience of a homeland that has been physically and metaphorically destroyed. The smell of dust, the sounds of a remembered neighbourhood, or the faces of the departed are just as much ‘country’ as a fixed place on a map. The dead are still amongst us in the present, lingering, demanding to be remembered. Whether one stays or leaves, the ‘country’ stays a wound that refuses to heal.
The narrative alternates between the voices and experiences of a mutilated deserter, Omar, who had his ear severed by the Ba’athist regime as punishment for desertion from the Iraqi army during the 1991 Gulf War; and Sami, a surgeon in Baghdad who flees sectarian violence to retire and live with his family in Brooklyn. Omar experiences the internal trauma caused by a domestic dictatorship in the 1990s, while Sami experiences the external trauma and displacement caused by foreign invasion and civil war in the 2000s, becoming increasingly disoriented as dementia takes hold. Exile is not just geographical; it is temporal. There is a tension between the desire to return and the realization that the country one longs to return to no longer exists.
The Book of Disappearance by Ibitsam Azem
Tr. Sinan Antoon
The Book of Disappearance is a strange, disturbing narrative that explores the weight of memory and the physical reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Set in a contemporary version of Tel Aviv /Jaffa, at the stroke of midnight, every single Palestinian living in Israel, including those in the West Bank and Gaza, simply vanishes. Buildings are left standing, coffee is left steaming on tables, and cars are abandoned in the middle of the street. There are no bodies and only a vast, echoing silence where millions of people once were.
The narrative unfolds through two central characters whose lives were intertwined before the disappearance. Alaa, a young Palestinian man, is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba of 1948. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, who is a liberal Israeli journalist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance. He finds and reads Alaa’s journal, and is forced to face the reality of his friend’s life, the history of the land they shared and, ultimately, the realization of how much Israeli society relied on the people who are now gone. The ‘absent’ Palestinians are more present in their disappearance than they were when they were physically present. Can a people be truly erased from a place, a landscape, they have inhabited for hundreds of generations?
Outsider Everywhere: Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina by Mercedes Halfon
Tr. Rahul Bery
Outsider Everywhere reconstructs the twenty-four years Gombrowicz spent in exile. Rather than a traditional cradle-to-grave account, it focuses on how a penniless, unknown foreigner transformed himself into a cult figure and one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.
In August 1939, Gombrowicz arrived in Buenos Aires on the maiden voyage of the Polish liner Chrobry. When war broke out days later, the ship was ordered back to Europe. In a moment of impulse, Gombrowicz grabbed his bags and walked off the ship, choosing the unknown of South America over the catastrophe of Europe. Had he stayed on the ship, he would have probably died in the war or been silenced. Instead, he chose a chaotic, penniless freedom. He was an outsider twice over: a Pole who didn’t fit in with the ‘official’ Polish diaspora and a writer ignored by the elite Argentine literary establishment.
After Ferdydurke was translated in a café, in a chaotic, legendary act of literary creation, by a group of rebellious young intellectuals who barely spoke Polish, guided by Gombrowicz who barely spoke Spanish, he began to find international acclaim. He eventually departed for Berlin and Paris in 1963. Halfon traces how he gathered this court of young disciples and how being an outsider allowed him to see through the stuffiness of the intellectual elite and the masks of society. Gombrowicz constructed himself so effectively that even his poverty was like a deliberate aesthetic choice. How does a writer who refuses to belong move from being nobody’s nothing to a Nobel Prize contender?
Event Horizon by Balsam Karam
Tr. Saskia Vogel
Set in a dystopian society, Event Horizon is a poetic exploration of resistance and marginalization. A disenfranchised population is banished to a desolate area beyond the mountains, the Outskirts. The residents, mainly mothers and daughters, live without legal status, rights, or access to healthcare. They survive by recycling junk and selling souvenirs to tourists. But seventeen-year-old Milde refuses to accept the order of things and, with two friends, rebels against governmental injustice. Their protest escalates into an attack on a city urban planning office using Molotov cocktails. Arrested, imprisoned and tortured, Milde is presented with a stark choice: a public execution, or participation in an experimental mission that will launch her into space, into a black hole known as the Mass. She chooses the Mass, opting to face its fathomless depth and loneliness to protect the morale of her community. It is better to become a distant myth than a broken corpse in a public square.
Of Kurdish descent, Balsam Karam may be living in Sweden but her gaze is non-European, rejecting the ‘grateful refugee’ position. Like Mohsin Hamid and Adania Shibli, she uses speculative fiction to illuminate the migrant crisis and border politics, describing the impossible bargains they are often forced to make and unimaginable realities of modern displacement.
The Villain’s Dance by Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Tr. Roland Glasser
Thirty years ago, in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the nation was still under the dictatorial grip of Mobutu Sese Seko. The pavement in front of the post office in Lubumbashi belongs to a gang of orphans and runaways who have traded family for a dangerous, wild kind of freedom. Fistfights, petty crime and glue-sniffing are the street kids’ daily fare. Molakisi, Ngungi and Sanza scrape by as best they can, caught between a life of petty crime and making ends meet. Driven by dreams of wealth, a couple venture as far as Angola, where civil war and diamond smuggling collide. War is lucrative time for business, but the stakes are extreme: make a killing, or be killed.
Failure carries a heavy price: Sanza, returned to Lubumbashi, is coerced by the ruthless intelligence services to spy on political dissidents. Molakisi risks his life in the gold mines of Angola, watched over by Tshiamuena, a charismatic diviner and prophetess. She is a larger-than-life character who acts as a spiritual mascot for the miners, while grieving the lost potential of an Angola free from colonial and capitalist exploitation. Franz, an Austrian writer arrived in Africa to research Katangese soldiers, ends up ghostwriting Tshiamuena’s memoirs instead. His journey leads him to the ‘Mambo de la Fête’ nightclub, where these fragmented lives converge on the dance floor in The Villain’s Dance, a frenzied rumba performed to forget the sweat and chaos of daily life.
A carnivalesque tale of rebellion, rampant corruption and the art of the hustle in a desperate dance to survive against the odds, this is a vibrant, feverish, baroque novel steeped in magical realism; written in a deconstructed narrative and multiple voices. The Villain’s Dance captures a lawless world where chaos is the norm. Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s verve and originality first displayed in his critically acclaimed debut Tram 83 remain as potent as ever. Once again, his taste for baroque chaos and devastating poetic flair, driven by a prose style that is deeply rhythmic and influenced by rumba, jazz, and mambo, are to be savoured and celebrated.
Buying books using the ‘BUY’ links helps support independent bookshops and our work as a CIC.
The copyright to all the content of this site is held by the individual authors and creators. All rights reserved. Enquiries: please use the contact form.
