Middle East

‘This powerful work cements Asgari as a vital voice in Australian literature’―Books + Publishing ‘Hossein Asgari’s Desolation speaks powerfully of the destructiveness of war and the hope that lies in fiction.’―The Conversation ‘You...

Acclaimed author of The Anthropologists Aysegül Savaş’s acute and tender first collection explores the distances we keep, and those we try to close, in the age of connectivity.A researcher abroad in Rome...

Translated by Max Weiss A heart-wrenching story about love, loss, sex, friendship between women, and the universal struggle to come to terms with death. Just before the outbreak of the...

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020 A family story about the unbreakable connection between the living and the dead Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic...

From International Booker Prize finalist Shokoofeh Azar, a stylistically audacious and emotionally powerful novel about one large, complicated family and a passionate love affair. Spanning fifty years in the history...

A young Muslim scholar living in Los Angeles, stuck in the mire of a flatlining academic career, decides to give up and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in...

Translated by Ruth Martin A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family's flight from and return to Iran.1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order...

Translated by Sinan Antoon Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, this critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel. What if...

This story came to me and entered my soul. It did not need a key or an invite, for it already belonged. It walked in, shook my foundation and set...

For readers of Pachinko and Queenie, a funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut that explores exile, ambition, and hope across three generations of Palestinian American women. Arabella gets an unexpected...

Translated by Barbara Romaine A sardonic, thrilling fable about collective memory and the many ways it can be saved or subverted. Four young, Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are...

A transgressive, lyrical and deeply moving literary debut about forbidden gay love in Iran Anjir and Zal have been together ever since they first knew what love was. But living...

The new novel from the first Arabic-language winner of the Booker International Prize. In their small, mountainside village, Ghazaala and Asiya love each other like sisters, until tragedy strikes, and...

A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unravelling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags,...

An unflinching story about Arab masculinity and homoeroticism Furat, a Syrian in his early 20s, visits Sibki Park in Damascus, one of the city’s most popular cruising areas. There he...

In this new novel by Syria’s most prominent writer of the National Book Award Finalist Planet of Clay, a wounded nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian Army remembers his life lived...

WINNER of the Republic of Consciousness Prize! Abandoned by her husband, marooned by an epic snowstorm, a mother gives birth to her third child. Her sense of entrapment turns into...

A gem-like parable about Palestine, timely and prismaticNabila Yasmeen is in her eighties. She lives alone with over a hundred plants that she keeps in pots because she can't bear...

The captivating and immersive story of a Kurdish family torn apart by migration set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisisRafiq Hardi Kermanj, founder of the Communist Party of...

Translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren The follow-up to the internationally acclaimed The President's Gardens On the sixth day of Ramadan, in a land without bananas, Qisma leaves for...

Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this is an electrifying new novel from contemporary Syria on life in a climate of fear In Damascus,...

The unforgettable, haunting story of a young woman's perilous fight for freedom and justice for her brother, the first novel published in English by a female Kurdish writer Set primarily...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020: The story of an Iranian man reckoning with his capacity for love and evil.Set in Iran and New York City, Man of...

Translated by Donal McLaughlin Part Odyssey of the Persian Gulf and part 1001 Nights in Europe, this debut novel is drawn from the author’s experiences as a political prisoner and...

Translated by Marilyn Booth An extraordinary novel from a 'remarkable' Booker Prize-winning author who has 'constructed her own novelistic form' (James Wood, The New Yorker) that follows one young Omani...

Translated by Leri PriceRima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. Rima finds refuge...

Translated by Jonathan Wright WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION A prize-winning horror novel from war-torn Iraq From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, the scavenger Hadi collects...

Translated by Susan MassottyA father-son tale set amid the tumultuous history of twentieth-century Iran, written by a masterful Iranian novelist in exile.When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate,...

This story came to me and entered my soul. It did not need a key or an invite, for it already belonged. It walked in, shook my foundation and set...

Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer24 MUST-READ 2022 BOOKS IN TRANSLATION as selected by BOOK RIOTIt’s 2011 and the Arab Spring is in full bloom when the discovery of two bodies in...

A critically-acclaimed Iranian author makes his American literary debut with this powerful and harrowing psychological portrait of modern Iran — an unprecedented and urgent work of fiction with echoes of...

Translated by Maureen Freely A lyrical autofictional account of the author's fight to survive depression and carve out her own path in 1950s and 60s Istanbul The narrator of Cold...

Winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize Celestial Bodies is set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a...

The Women’s Prize shortlisted novel about two star-crossed lovers in war-torn Cyprus Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both...

Hussam and Wassim are teenaged boys living in Syria during America's invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. When a surprise discovery results in tragedy, their lives, and those of...

In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef.They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in...

A young woman spends her days watching the neighbours through their windows. She is a refugee, who has seen the failure of the Arab Spring in her homeland and who...

From the widely acclaimed author of American War, Omar El Ekkad, a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic and profoundly moving novel that brings the global refugee crisis down to the level...

Poet Omar Sakr's debut novel is a fierce and fantastic force that illuminates the bonds that bind families together as well as what can break them. An estranged father. An...

Translated by Luke Leafgren A master of contemporary Arabic fiction returns to English translation with a cunningly layered dark comedy about the powers and limits of creativity in a war...

Translated by Max Weiss A powerful and beautiful Syrian novel set in Aleppo during the early days of the civil war that followed the Arab Spring. Jumaa is a schoolteacher...

A magical, cross-century tale of self-discovery from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World — now a Penguin Essential Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three...

A 'marvelous' (Lauren Groff) and riveting novel about a woman who has come undone. A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter,...

A new book by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Part detective story, part historical epic — a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague taking over...

A sweeping tale of life and death, set in the Syrian capital at the turn of the twentieth century. December, 1907: one morning after a night of drunken carousing in...

The Guggenheim Fellowship and Whiting Award-winning author Louis Edwards makes his long-awaited comeback with this epic tale of a New Orleans boy whose very creation is so filled with tension...

Translated by Martin ChalmersGrowing up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a young Kurdish boy named Kerim has ample opportunity to witness the murderous repression that defined the era for thousands of...

Told in vignettes that flash between the US and the Middle East, Zaina Arafat's powerful debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to creative and confused adulthood. In...

Where do you go when you can't go home? On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. Although she...

A woman reeling from a disastrous love affair finds love and hope in Shakespeare and Palestine'Magnificent' OBSERVER'Different to anything else being written right now in English' SUNDAY TIMES'A pretty flawless writer' THE TIMESAfter...