Bøger af Hala El Badry

In this prize-winning novel, Nahid is a woman determined to go on a journey of self discovery and understanding. As we accompany her in her sometimes delirious, sometimes lucid journey, we are given rare glimpses of the inner thoughts and feelings of a woman confronting questions of love and intimacy within and outside of marriage. It is a story of one woman's quest for liberation, not from a repressive society or a male-dominated world-that is easy and has been done many times before-but from self-imposed taboos that inhibit a woman's ability to find fulfillment and to confront the many imponderables surrounding sexuality, desire, and love.Stuck-by conscious choice to keep up the genteel appearances of her middle-class family-in a loveless marriage to Mustafa, the forty-something Nahid finds love and sex with novelist and journalist Omar-himself trapped in a loveless, but not sexless, marriage to Maggie. Although their love story is at the very heart of the novel, we are given broad glimpses of the larger picture of the world outside through Nahid's work as an archaeologist and Omar's as a journalist.The novel was well received by women readers, critics, and reviewers and by a majority of the male audience, while a vociferous minority of male critics felt scandalized by it, finding it unseemly that such issues should be raised by a woman. Now English readers can judge for themselves.

What was it like to live in Iraq before the earth-shaking events of the end of the twentieth century? The mid-seventies to the late eighties witnessed Saddam Hussein's rise to power, the establishment of Kurdish autonomy in the north, and the Iraq-Iran war. It also brought an influx of oil wealth and a parallel influx of Arab talent, including many Egyptians.The narrator has a behind-the-scenes view of what was really happening at a critical juncture in the history of the region. Moreover, she has a mystery to solve: an Iraqi woman, a communist journalist, has disappeared...

Set in the sleepy Egyptian village of Muntaha during the late 1940s, this novel paints a vibrant portrait of rural life in Egypt. Between the turbulent events of 1948 and the final years of the British presence in Egypt, the village's inhabitants find themselves caught up against their will in the swirl of larger world events.