6 Books Published by Saqi Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Bahiah Shaheen, an eighteen-year-old medical student and the daughter of a prominent Egyptian public official, finds the male students in her class coarse and alien. Her father, too, seems to belong to a race apart. Frustrated by her hardworking, well-behaved, middle-class public persona, her meeting with a stranger at a gallery one day proves to be the beginning of her road to self-discovery and the start of her realization that fulfilment in life is indeed possible.

This powerful and poetic novel by "Egypt’s most interesting feminist" (Booklist ) raises awareness of the predicament of women in Egypt. The book tells the story of Bint Allah, a beautiful illegitimate girl, whose father is the Imam—the religious ruler in Islamic society believed to be representative of God. Bint Allah is falsely accused by the Imam of adulterous relationships, then sentenced to death by stoning. It is through the eyes of Bint Allah that one can see the underlying hypocrisy of a male-dominated religious state.

Distinguished literary critic Bodour is trapped in a loveless marriage and carries with her a dark secret. She fell in love in her youth and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Zeina, whom she abandoned on the streets of Cairo.

Bodour doesn’t know that Zeina has blossomed into one of Egypt’s most beloved entertainers. Pining for her estranged daughter, she writes a fictional account of her life in an attempt to find solace. But as the revolution in Cairo begins to gain fire, the novel goes missing and Bodour must find who has stolen it. Will her hunt for the thief bring mother and daughter together? Or is Bodour destined to lose her daughter to Cairo forever?

A woman disappears without a trace. The police commissioner investigating the case enquires: was she of dubious morals, was she the rebellious sort? Nobody understands how a woman could simply walk away, leaving husband and home behind. After all, in the Kingdom of Oil where His Majesty reigns supreme, no woman has ever dared disobey the command of men.

When the woman finally reappears, there is a blurring between the men in her life. In a tangle of dream-like scenarios, she leaves one to become the wife of another, but when she eventually returns to her first husband she finds that he has taken a new wife. She is trapped in a man-made web, unable to escape from a male figure who is always half-asleep and who continually fills urns that she must carry.

Surreal and satirical, Love in the Kingdom of Oil is a startling reflection on the limits of female freedom in a society unable and unwilling to shrug off the multiple faces of patriarchy.

"More than any other woman, El Saadawi has come to embody the trials of Arab feminism."—San Francisco Chronicle

This is a collection that brings together the two plays that led to Nawal El Saadawi being charged with "insulting Islam" in Egypt.

Both works develop key themes of El Saadawi’s work: that religions are inimical to women and the poor, that the oppression of women is reprehensible and not solely characteristic of the Middle East or the Third World, and that free speech is fundamental to any society.

Nawal El Saadawi is a distinguished visiting professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kalakuta Republic is a powerful collection of poems detailing the harrowing experiences endured by Abani and others at the hands of Nigeria’s military regime in the late 1980s. Abani’s poems are dedicated to those who experienced but did not live through the suffering. In the poems, he describes the characters that people this dark world, from the prison inmates to their torturers, the generals. Kalakuta Republic is based on Abani’s experience as political prisoner between 1985 and 1991.