A collection of short stories by one of the Arab world’s most accomplished and acclaimed writers.A grandmother who takes on a thief trying to seduce her daughters. A guard who fantasises about killing his general while locked in battle with a non-existent enemy. A film script about Libya’s traffic problems improvised at a workshop. A woman’s letter from her old school, which is now a makeshift refugee camp. A cow straying into a field, breaking an age-old truce between warring factions. The eight stories of Catalogue of a Private Life feel like oft-recounted folktales, where the ordinary has been softly twisted several degrees. Najwa Bin Shatwan navigates the tensions between loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret, and tenderness and cruelty to weave a portrait of family, war and nation against a stark backdrop of the completely absurd.
About the author
Sawad Hussain is an award-winning Arabic-English literary translator. She is a judge for the Palestine Book Awards. She holds an MA in Arabic literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her Twitter handle is @sawadhussain and her upcoming translations can be found here: sawadhussain.com
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