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Book Title

The Dissenters

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Youssef Rakha
Body
Certain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.
 
Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.
 
Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

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List Price
$17.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-319-3
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
296
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history

About the Author

Youssef  Rakha
Credit: Bassam El Zoghby
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, The Crocodiles, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.
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Upcoming Events

Youssef Rakha reading and in conversation about THE DISSENTERS at Magers & Quinn

Date:
Location:
Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis, MNview map

Praise

  • “With thrilling prose and a narrative that flows as relentless as the Nile, Youssef Rakha takes us on the big dipper of Egyptian history from Nasser to now. The Dissenters is by turns haunted, horrifying, and hilarious.”—Tim Mackintosh-Smith
  • The Dissenters is the book of witnessing par excellence, telling not the story of just one woman or one Egypt, but rather of all of us who are of these geographies.”—Salar Abdoh
  • The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lives set them on a collision course with Egypt's military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath.”—Amitav Ghosh
  • “One of the most original and inventive writers of his generation.”—Omar Robert Hamilton
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