At a glance

Ulweya Subh, a Lebanese writer, published a collection of short stories, Nawm Al-Ayyam (The Sleep of Days), in 1986, but this is her first novel, and it comes as a pleasant surprise. The author's skill in narrative, her ability to combine both traditional and experimental methods of story-telling and her insight into human experience suggest that the interval between her first publication and her second was well spent.

Mariam Al-Khati'a will place Subh at the forefront of the contemporary avant-garde, the novel evidencing remarkable technical accomplishment. The book's circular structure, plurality of voices and understanding of the psychological and social dimensions of its characters' lives, as well as of the history of the Lebanese Civil War, will make it a notable addition to contemporary literature.

Abdel-Hakim Haydar has written three collections of stories -- Sayyad fi Khous (Hunter in a Hut, 1995), Ghazl Al-Shay (Weaving Tea, 1997) and Bait Al-Najjar (Carpenter's House, 2000) -- and one novel, Ward Al-Ahlam (Dream Roses, 1997). He is, therefore, a writer with a considerable record behind him, which makes it all the more surprising that the present book, a collection of 10 short stories, reads like a series of exercises rather than as a finished publication. The stories do little to demonstrate Haydar's skill as a writer, being either excessively general or pretentiously ambiguous. This is a disappointing book.

Nakhla 'ala Al-Haffa (Palm Tree at the Edge), Gamil Attia Ibrahim, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, 2002. pp189 The author's ninth novel, this book fully engages with its historical moment, following the dispossessed and the marginalised across the post-11 September world and tackling topics such as the war in Afghanistan and the Israeli incursions into the West Bank. Metwalli Aggoura, the novel's protagonist, is in his early 70s, having become politically conscious in 1946, when he witnessed the Abbas Bridge incident in which many student demonstrators were killed. Through an account of Aggoura's life half a century later, Attia is able both to explore developments during the intervening decades and to ask what the revolutionary awakening that the country saw in the 1940s has now come to. As the author points out, while the current climate of opinion in the West has labelled Arabs and Muslims as terrorists, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon continues brutally to crush Palestinian resistance with impunity.

In the five short stories included in this collection, Khairi Abdel-Gawwad continues the project explored in his previous eight books, three short-story collections and five novels. His predilection for popular and folk heritage, through which he expresses thoroughly modern predicaments, means that he draws on both the language and the content of traditional epics and myths, placing him at the centre of an important, if arguably minor, movement in contemporary writing. Nevertheless, in the present book the reader may have the feeling that Abdel-Gawwad is repeating himself, this collection being not significantly different from his previous ones.

In this, the writer's first book of short stories, Ahmed El-Sherif proves himself capable both of handling the language and of expressing himself effectively. However, given the book's fragmentary, disconnected character, one has the sense that he has produced fragments of a personal journal rather than short stories as such.

Despite an astonishing number of typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors of every kind, this book nevertheless manages to go some way towards delivering on its promised subject: the life of an Upper Egyptian girl from Aswan, who is alienated from the moeurs of the traditional society in which she lives. In terms both of its style and of its narrative structure the novel is far from perfect, but it is worth attention if only because of the interest of its subject matter.

The Moroccan writer and critic Mohamed Berrada is best known for his novel Lu'bat Al-Nisyan (The Game of Forgetting), set in Paris. In this, his latest novel, the author returns to his native country, describing a similar journey by the protagonist of the earlier novel. This allows him to give a perspective on contemporary political and social developments, presenting both the events that fill the newspapers and the moments of despair suffered by former revolutionaries as well as present-day political activists. Berrada's language in the novel is dry, his tone uniform and the events he depicts largely devoid of colour. The novel thus reads more as a documentary report than as a work of fiction, yet it is notably well put together and presents characters who are representative of many in the contemporary Arab world.

Al-Nubi (The Nubian), Idris Ali, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation (Kitabat Jadida Series), 2001. pp123 Idris Ali, in common with many other Nubian writers, has focused on the Nubians' experience of evacuation from their homeland during the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s. The theme of his three short-story collections and two novels, in the present book Idris again focuses on this experience, giving a notably deeper and more satisfying description of it. Some of Idris's previous work was marred by a shrill tone, but this is absent from Al-Nubi, which is beautifully structured and finely balanced. This is a novel that invites comparison with the late Nubian novelist Mohamed Khalil Qasim's classic work, Al-Shamandoura.

Jidar Akhir, Mai Khaled's first novel, is a fascinating production, giving a fresh perspective on life through its rich detail and rejection of currently fashionable precepts. In recent years, "women's writing", perhaps because of its popularity among critics, has concentrated on the physical, giving rise to a style of writing called "writing the body". This notion, in fact highly intellectual, has shifted the emphasis away from the public and towards the private and the personal, much women's writing now aiming to reproduce immediate consciousness and the direct apprehension of the body. Sometimes this can amount to little more than sprinkling erotic spice over a rather bland meal.

Khaled is different, however, in that the six pieces making up this book focus entirely on the external world, while evincing a confident writer's voice from their author. This achievement is only reinforced by the fact that the subject matter of the stories is so commonplace, being the daily anxieties, uncertainties and paradoxes in the life of an ordinary Egyptian family.

This fictionalised autobiography by Amir Tajesser, a Sudanese writer known for his 1998 novel Nar Al-Zagharid (Fire of Ululation), is made up of 60 short "scenes" in which the writer recounts his experiences working with tribes in southern Sudan. Some of these scenes are of remarkable power and intensity, but this is not enough to save the collection as a whole, with the finished sequence resembling a series of anecdotes rather than a fully realised piece.

This slim volume of short stories is by a writer of great talent and interest, who, in the 15 very short pieces that make up the volume, has favoured the implicit over the explicit and transcended the obsessively personal, body-oriented angst of his generation. Drawing on the heritage of The Thousand and One Nights and traditional Arab storytelling, El-Sharqawi demonstrates an impressively broad perspective on the life surrounding him, knowing very well how to express this with an extreme economy of means.

Mohamed Nagui has published three novels: Khafiyat Al-Qamar (The Moon's Hiding, 1994), Lahn Al-Sabah (Morning Tune, 1994) and Maqamat Arabiya (Arab Maqams, 1999). The present volume is by far his greatest achievement to date, even if the novel, made up of two texts that remain to all intents and purposes entirely separate, is in fact two novels and not one.

Naguib Mahfouz has written in detail about life in Islamic Cairo, especially the neighbourhoods surrounding Al-Hussein Mosque, and it must have seemed to many that the master had virtually exhausted this subject-matter. For this reason, Nagui's achievement is all the more impressive in that not only has he managed to escape Mahfouz's influence, he has also managed to carve out a niche for himself within that world, describing it in a language that is individual to him and owes nothing to Mahfouz. The novel is impossible to summarise: suffice it to signal instead the colourful, teaming images evoked by Nagui's writing and the mythology and magic of the lives he depicts.

The Tiller of Waters narrates the many-layered recollections of a hallucinating man in devastated Beirut. The desolate, almost surreal, urban landscape is enriched by the unfolding of the family sagas of Niqula Mitri and his beloved Shamsa, the Kurdish maid. Both Mitri and his father are textile merchants and see the world through the code of cloth, from the intimacy of linen, velvet, and silk to the most impersonal of synthetics. Shamsa in turn relates her story, the myriad adventures of her parents and grandparents who moved from Iraqi Kurdistan to Beirut. Thus, haunting scenes of pastoral Kurds are juxtaposed against the sedentary decadence of metropolitan residents, and the effect is simply spellbinding.

The Egyptian countryside novel is a recognised literary genre, often allowing those born or living in towns and cities to rediscover their rural roots. This new example of the genre by Mohamed Ibrahim Taha is firmly rooted in the form's traditions, while also making an individual contribution to them. Taha, unlike many writers who look to the countryside for their subject-matter, is able genuinely to enter into the rural life that he describes, giving many fascinating details of the intricate patterns of life in the Egyptian countryside. However, he does not indulge excessively in this vein, having a mastery of the classical language as well as an understanding of the wider historical and psychological implications of the topic at hand.