la litterature Arabe toujour assez meconnue en Europe

des livres a lire a tout prie
ou vous serer plus pauvre de connaissances



TALES OF ARABIA: SIX TO READ

Naguib Mahfouz

The Cairo Trilogy

(Black Swan; three volumes) £9.99

Egypt's Nobel Prize winner, who died in 2006 at the age of 94, had a sometimes risky ringside side for his country's 20th-century history. He used it to create a body of work that almost single-handedly revived the fortunes of Arabic prose fiction in the West. Often compared to Dickens or Balzac, this great family and political saga of his city in the throes of change is an addictive, and distinctively Arab, chronicle of private and public life.

Hanan Al Shaykh

Only in London

(Bloomsbury) £6.99

Since the 1970s, the influx of Arab visitors and residents has intrigued and often baffled native Brits. Comic, tender and mischievous, this novel by the fearless and pioneering Lebanese writer tells the stories of a quartet of these incomers. Erotic imbroglios join touching family dramas and episodes of farce in humanising the least-understood tribe of new Londoners.

Elias Khoury

Gate of the Sun

(Vintage) £7.99

The unending Israel-Palestine conflict still looms like a black cloud over much of Arab culture. No Arabic novel has tackled it with more courage and vision than this epic by a Lebanese author who spent years researching the stories of Palestinian refugees in the camps. Free of slogans and clichés, it captures all the labyrinthine complexity of the crisis and the human tragedy of its victims.

Alaa Al Aswany

The Yacoubian Building

(HarperPerennial) £7.99

The Cairo dentist-turned-bestseller has launched a thousand painful puns, but then his fiction does get right to the root of modern Egypt's dilemmas. Set during the first Gulf War, this tapestry of tales threads the inhabitants of one crumbling Cairo apartment block into a panoramic picture of the city. His people dream of happiness beyond all the intractable divisions of gender, class and culture.

Rajaa Alsanea

Girls of Riyadh

(Fig Tree) £7.99

Women may not drive in Saudi Arabia, but they certainly write. New technology, especially the blog, has given a sudden visibility to younger Saudi voices. This email-based novel made Alsanea the first of this generation to break through into mainstream international fiction. She transforms chick-lit conventions into an eye-opening group portrait of the children of privilege whose dreams of rebellion crash into their own, and their society's, boundaries.

Khaled Al Khamissi

Taxi

(Aflame Books) £7.99

The Egyptian documentary film-maker and columnist Al Khamissi makes good use of his skills of reportage in this runaway success that combines the fictional monologues of Cairo's cabbies. Not so much a conventional novel as a string of satirical stand-up routines brought to the page, Taxi builds into a frank, funny and sometimes heartbreaking blast of jokes, anecdotes and revelations. Listen to the "Arab street" in all its smoggy, gasping glory.




je suis sure que ils doivent etre traduit en francais maintenant