The year is shaping up to be an important one for Arab authors.
From novels excavating modern Egyptian history to memoirs emerging from Gaza’s devastation, these new books vary in style and subject but all expand the possibilities of literature. They blend family drama with political and cultural critique, reimagine history or look towards speculative futures, where even dreams are under surveillance.
Here are 11 books in English by Arab authors that are worth a read.
The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha
Youssef Rakha’s The Dissenters traces 70 years of Egyptian history through the fragmented portrait of a mother.
The novel follows a journalist named Nour, who after his mother’s death, withdraws to the attic and begins sifting through her belongings, piecing together a life that sharply reflects Egypt’s turbulent modern history. Nour weaves together his mother’s contradictory experiences in letters to his sister, written as if in a fever dream and elucidating a life shaped by marriage, politics, faith and revolution. The Dissenters fuses family drama with historical reflection, satire with metafiction.
Published on February 4
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against defies simple categorisation.
Written after Israel began its war on Gaza, the book is part memoir, part political mediation and reportage. At its core, it is a confrontation of the western world’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction.
Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian novelist known for American War, exposes how ideals of freedom and justice have collapsed under the guise of neutrality. The title of the book reflects how moral stances easily shift once violence has passed. El Akkad reflects upon these topics as he also recounts his own upbringing across Egypt, Qatar and Canada.
This is a book that is as philosophically rich as it is urgent.
Published on February 13
The Eyes of Gaza by Plestia Alaqad
In The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience, Plestia Alaqad turns her daily diary into a powerful memoir.
Alaqad was 21 years old when Israel began its attack on Gaza in October 2023. Within months, her social media videos and posts became vital documentation of the daily reality for Gazans as they fought to survive bombardment. Her work earned her the moniker The Eyes of Gaza.
Her book collects her diary entries into a stirring, first-hand account of the war. Alaqad records not only the destruction and fear but also the resilience of those around her, and the gestures of care and tenderness she witnessed across Gaza.
The Eyes of Gaza is an intimate and unflinching testimony and love letter to a homeland under fire.
Published on February 20
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami is known for her compelling storytelling and insightful examinations of culture and identity.
Her debut work Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, published in 2005, follows a group of Moroccan immigrants who attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Spain, in search of a better life. Her second work, The Moor’s Account, was a reimagining of the story of Estebanico, the Moroccan slave who became the first African to explore North America. Her mystery novel, The Other Americans, published in 2019, pivots around the death of a Moroccan immigrant in California after a hit-and-run.
While the novels share overlapping themes, they are also markedly different in genres, and underscore Lalami’s literary fearlessness. In The Dream Hotel, she takes another leap, this time in a near-distant future where, as the novel teases, “even dreams are under surveillance”.
Published on March 4
Motherhood and Its Ghosts by Iman Mersal
Motherhood and Its Ghosts leaps forth from the single photograph Iman Mersal has of her mother, who died in childbirth when the author was seven years old.
Through the photograph, Mersal ponders upon maternal identity while moving between journal entries and literary reflections. Originally published in 2017 in Arabic, the book has been released in English with a translation by Robin Moger.
Motherhood and Its Ghosts is a lyrical and profound examination of how we reconstruct and remember when confronted with absence.
Published on May 13
Sleep Phase by Mohamed Kheir
Sleep Phase follows a translator named Warif who struggles to readapt to life in Cairo after being released from prison where he was serving a seven-year sentence for Facebook posts criticising the government.
The Cairo he re-enters isn’t the city he remembers. The novel resembles the absurdist works of Kafka and Gogol as Warif tries to find work as a translator, going through an endless string of meetings with officials. The encounters are more like interrogations than job interviews, and Warif begins to experience panic attacks and flashbacks of his torture in prison. Sleep Phase is a wonderfully disorienting novel that comes as a study of repression.
Published on May 13
What Will People Think? by Sara Hamdan
A heartfelt novel about identity, family secrets and self-discovery, What Will People Think? recently made international headlines when it was featured on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
The novel’s protagonist is Mia Almas, a Palestinian American who aspires to be a stand-up comedian while grappling with expectations of her traditional Arab family. Mia’s story – set in New York in 2011 – is intertwined with her grandmother’s hidden past. In the novel, Mia discovers a diary written by her “Teta” in 1940s Jaffa, just as she was on the verge of displacement during the Nakba.
The entries trace the life of a young woman celebrated as the village beauty, torn between her family’s expectations of a wealthy marriage and her own attraction to a British soldier. The romance is brief and ultimately devastating – a metaphor, perhaps, for Palestine’s unravelling.
Published on May 20
Empty Cages by Fatma Qandil
Empty Cages is new English translation of the 2022 winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
The novel begins as its narrator discovers an old tin for chocolates that is filled with photographs and poems. As the youngest child in a middle-class Egyptian family, she revisits a childhood shadowed by the selfishness of her older brothers, her father’s addiction and her mother’s illness. Empty Cages is a gripping read as Qandil’s prose, translated by Adam Talib, capers off the page in a raw meditation on grief and survival.
Published on May 27
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan
With I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, Palestinian-American writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan turns to memoir after several acclaimed novels and poetry collections.
The book traces years of miscarriages and the decision to entrust another woman to carry her child. As the pregnancy progresses, Alyan excavates her family’s history of displacement across Palestine, Kuwait, Lebanon and the US. The result is a candid, polyphonic read about how private grief overlaps with diaspora, inheritance and the process of waiting.
Published on June 3
My Voice Cannot Be Bombed by Yahya Al Hamarna
My Voice Cannot Be Bombed is the debut poetry collection of Yahya Al Hamarna, written amid Israel’s continuing war on Gaza.
The collection, written with fierce and tender prosody, shifts from the intimacy of refugee tents to imagined spaces of freedom. Al Hamarna’s poems trace the violence of war alongside the small acts that sustain life, such as studying, walking to the park, reading poetry and making tea.
Published on August 11
The True Story of Raja the Gullible by Rabih Alameddine
Lebanese-American novelist Rabih Alameddine is known for works such as An Unnecessary Woman, The Angel of History, and The Hakawati, where he wove epic Arab storytelling traditions into contemporary story.
His fiction often takes on heavy themes such as exile and belonging with a satirical edge.
In his newest work, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible, Alameddine reflects on life in Beirut with his idiosyncratic, caustic humour.
The novel follows a 63-year-old high school philosophy teacher who lives with his controlling mother in a small Beirut apartment. The relationship is described as “unbreakable and insane”. But Raja is invited to a writing residency in the US, and the timing seems like a good fortune as he is looking to escape the private and national calamities that shape his life.
Will be published on September 2
