Mai Al-Nakib

Sara, a philosophy professor at Kuwait University, has long had an uneasy relationship with her homeland. But after her mother’s death, inertia keeps her there – until she is accused of blasphemy and faces the threat of execution. As she awaits trial, Sara is forced to reckon with her place in the world and the women who shaped her. Her grandmothers’ lives span privilege and poverty: Yasmine, who married the son of a Pasha and soon regretted it, and Lulwa, swept from hardship into the wealth of an Indian merchant’s household. Then there are her two mothers: Noura, restless for America, and Maria, the devoted ayah who leaves her own children behind in Pune to raise Sara and her brother.A sweeping saga, An Unlasting Home captures the tragedies and triumphs of three generations of Arab women in one unforgettable tale.

A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country’s growing hostility towards the West. A self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two belligerent classmates. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. A Kuwaiti woman returns to her family after being held captive in Iraq for a decade.The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived – adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib’s luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people – and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.