Recommendations based on "A Palace in the Old Village. by Tahar Ben Jelloun"
Based on your reading history, we think you will also enjoy the following books.
By Shafak Elif
A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.Years later, a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited - her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.A moving, beautifully written and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.
By Elif Shafak
An intensely powerful new novel from the best-selling author of The Bastard of Istanbul and Honour'In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila's consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away...'For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the long-awaited birth of a son; the sight of bubbling vats of lemon and sugar which the women use to wax their legs while the men attend mosque; the scent of cardamom coffee that Leila shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each memory, too, recalls the friends she made at each key moment in her life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her. . .
By Saadat Hasan Manto, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Many of us know how the partition of India and Pakistan came about. However, there are several other stories that took place during that time that we need to be aware of. There are several tragedies which have not received as much importance as the partition itself.The book is a collection of unforgettable stories put together as Saadat Hasan Manto s most powerful pieces. It is based on the Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in the year 1947. The book contains many stories like Toba Tek Singh, The Return, The Assignment, Colder Than Ice and many more. All these stories come alive to put forward the most tragic events in the history of the subcontinent.
By Ronya Othmann
Ronya Othmann’s debut novel narrates the coming of age of Leyla, a Yazidi–Kurdish–German girl. She spends the school year in her mother’s home country of Germany but travels every summer to her father’s home village in Syria, near the Turkish border. She knows its smells and tastes. She knows its stories. She knows where the Yazidi villagers keep their suitcases hidden, should they need to escape again. And she watches from afar, horrified, as ISIS troops move on the village, threatening the lives of her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends.Leyla’s sexual awakening proves far less traumatic than her growing disenchantment with her German classmates and friends, who appear completely indifferent to the fate of her Yazidi community. Thoughtful and poignant, The Summers addresses issues of gender, sexuality, cultural difference, politics, and identity. Othmann draws readers into multiple worlds, ultimately revealing the hopes and dreams that bind us all together when forces threaten to tear us apart.
By Shafak Elif
The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World ***** There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel set between the 19th century and modern times, about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris - their lives all curiously touched by the epic of Gilgamesh. ***** 'Elif Shafak is a unique and powerful voice in world literature' Ian McEwan 'Shafak makes a new home for us in words' Colum McCann 'One of the best writers in the world today' Hanif Kureishi
By Matar Hisham
A masterful, intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide - from the Booker-shortlisted, Pulitzer prize-winning author of THE RETURNKhaled and Mustafa meet at university in two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.'I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice' Elif Shafak
By Betty Mahmoody, William Hoffer
Not Without My Daughter is the true story of a courageous mother and her breathtaking odyssey, now a major motion picture starring Academy Award-winner Sally Field!In August 1984, Michigan housewife Betty Mahmoody accompanied her husband to his native Iran for a two-week vacation. To her horror, she found herself and her four-year-old daughter, Mahtob, virtual prisoners of a man rededicated to his Shiite Moslem faith, in a land where women are near-slaves and Americans are despised. Their only hope for escape lay in a dangerous underground that would not take her child...Not Without My Daughter is a Literary Guild Alternate Selection.
By Saadat Hasan Manto
Many of us know how the partition of India and Pakistan came about. However, there are several other stories that took place during that time that we need to be aware of. There are several tragedies which have not received as much importance as the partition itself.The book is a collection of unforgettable stories put together as Saadat Hasan Manto s most powerful pieces. It is based on the Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in the year 1947. The book contains many stories like Toba Tek Singh, The Return, The Assignment, Colder Than Ice and many more. All these stories come alive to put forward the most tragic events in the history of the subcontinent.
By Susan Muaddi Darraj
“Behind You Is the Sea fearlessly confronts stereotypes about Palestinian culture, weaving a remarkable portrait of life's intricate moments, from joyous weddings to heart-wrenching funerals, from shattered hearts to hidden truths—I wept and grew alongside this family. This is a story that challenges perceptions, offering a heartfelt glimpse into the interior lives of those who call this community home. A must read novel with unforgettable characters and an unwavering, fresh voice—I couldn’t put it down until the very last page! Darraj delivers an instant, necessary, and authentic classic to the cannon of Arab-American literature.”—Etaf Rum, author of Evil Eye and A Woman Is No ManAn exciting debut novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—lives which intersect across divides of class, generation, and religion.Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America.Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose own family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for “dishonoring” their name. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.Behind You Is the Sea faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.
By Naguib Mahfouz
Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt—Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street—together for the first time in one beautiful hardcover volume.The masterwork of the Nobel Prize-winning author, the three novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons–the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace of Desire, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Sugar Street brings Mahfouz’s vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician.Throughout the trilogy, the family’s trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two World Wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, “The Cairo Trilogy extends our knowledge of life; it also confirms it” (The Boston Globe).Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.