If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English: A Novel
Noor Naga, "If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English: A Novel"
English | ISBN: 164445081X | 2022 | 192 pages | MOBI | 842 KB
English | ISBN: 164445081X | 2022 | 192 pages | MOBI | 842 KB
Winner of the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2022 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire.
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants “returning” to a country she’s never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire―for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other―takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas,
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