Here are 49 books that The Fugitives fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a writer and an Arabic to English translator, with a PhD in Arabic Theatre from the University of Edinburgh. In recent years, I have gravitated towards the history of popular culture and the demi-monde in the Middle East. The stories of singers and dancers say much more to me than the conventional subjects of histories of the Arab world – politicians, soldiers, etc. Through them, we can see the Middle East in a way that we seldom see in the West means much more to a lot of the people who live there.
Ziad Fahmy’s book on the importance of popular culture in the history of modern Egypt and the anti-British revolution of 1919 was a real landmark. Bringing together songs, jokes, vaudeville plays, and more, he manages to draw out a story of Egyptian anti-colonial, nationalism that is not confined to elite circles or confined by bourgeois morality. This is history from the streets. Although it is an academic book, it is written with an engaging style that captures some of the excitement of this period. Published in 2011, Fahmy’s book opened up space for research and writing on the history of Arabic pop culture.
The popular culture of pre-revolution Egypt did more than entertain-it created a nation. Songs, jokes, and satire, comedic sketches, plays, and poetry, all provided an opportunity for discussion and debate about national identity and an outlet for resistance to British and elite authority. This book examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity.
Ordinary Egyptians shifts the typical focus of study away from the intellectual elite to understand the rapid politicization of the growing literate middle classes and…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a writer and an Arabic to English translator, with a PhD in Arabic Theatre from the University of Edinburgh. In recent years, I have gravitated towards the history of popular culture and the demi-monde in the Middle East. The stories of singers and dancers say much more to me than the conventional subjects of histories of the Arab world – politicians, soldiers, etc. Through them, we can see the Middle East in a way that we seldom see in the West means much more to a lot of the people who live there.
Although most of the books written on the Nile focus on Egypt, the river stretches from the Mediterranean down to Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile converge. Unfortunately, it is not a history of Khartoum’s nightlife (although there are people working on books about that now). Rather it uses the names given to women’s tobes (a popular form of dress) to recover the lost voices of ordinary women in mid-20th century Sudan – “Khartoum at Night” is one of those names. Through them, Brown finds a new and innovative way to tell the story of modern Sudan.
In the first half of the twentieth century, a pioneering generation of young women exited their homes and entered public space, marking a new era for women's civic participation in northern Sudan. A provocative new public presence, women's civic engagement was at its core a bodily experience. Amid the socio-political upheavals of imperial rule, female students, medical workers, and activists used a careful choreography of body movements and fashion to adapt to imperial mores, claim opportunities for political agency, and shape a new standard of modern, mobile womanhood.
Khartoum at Night is the first English-language history of these women's lives,…
I am a writer and an Arabic to English translator, with a PhD in Arabic Theatre from the University of Edinburgh. In recent years, I have gravitated towards the history of popular culture and the demi-monde in the Middle East. The stories of singers and dancers say much more to me than the conventional subjects of histories of the Arab world – politicians, soldiers, etc. Through them, we can see the Middle East in a way that we seldom see in the West means much more to a lot of the people who live there.
Published in French or Arabic, this richly and attractively illustrated book dives headfirst into nostalgia for the nightlife of the 20th century Middle East. Loaded with short vignettes and stories, accompanied by Ziade’s own drawings, this book takes the reader on a tour of nightclubs in Cairo and across the wider Middle East. It is a beautiful, misty-eyed elegy for a lost age.
Dans ce livre il y a les cabarets du Caire, les studios, villas, casinos du Caire, les maris, les amants, l'alcool, les somnifères, l'argent, les suicides, les brownings, les scandales, les palaces. Il y a le chant, la musique, la voix, les ovations, les triomphes, la gloire. Il y a l'audace, le génie, l'aventure, la tragédie. Il y a des poètes et des émirs, des danseuses, des banquiers, des officiers, des imams, des cheikhs, des actrices, des khawagates, des musiciens, des vamps, des noctambules, des révoltés, des sultans, des pachas, des beys, des espionnes, des prodiges, des rois d'Égypte et…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a writer and an Arabic to English translator, with a PhD in Arabic Theatre from the University of Edinburgh. In recent years, I have gravitated towards the history of popular culture and the demi-monde in the Middle East. The stories of singers and dancers say much more to me than the conventional subjects of histories of the Arab world – politicians, soldiers, etc. Through them, we can see the Middle East in a way that we seldom see in the West means much more to a lot of the people who live there.
The essential biography of Umm Kulthum for the English reader. Danielson tells the story of the Arab world’s most famous singer, one of the greatest performers of the 20th century. This book charts her life from the small village in the Nile Delta where she grew up to the heights of global superstardom. It also paints a picture of the world that she moved through, which intersected with the world depicted in Midnight in Cairo. This is a necessary read for anyone interested in Arabic music.
Umm Kuthum was a celebrated musical performer in the Arab world, and her songs still permeate the international airwaves. This, the first English-language biography, chronicles her life and career. In particular, it examines her popularity in a society which discouraged women from public performance. The text examines the careful construction of Kulthum's popularity; from childhood her mentors honed her abilities to accord with Arab and Muslim practice, but ultimately, she created her own idiom from local precedents and traditions, and developed original song styles from both populist and neo-classical traditions. Danielson seeks to show how Umm Kulthum's music and public…
Why me / this list? Well, as a kid of parents whose cities were blitzed, I spent my early years in a tiny English village, eventually walking to school through the graveyard of a 12th-century church. We moved to Canada when I was eight, and a whole new history bloomed – Iroquois and coureur de bois were magnetic! As I evolved into a voracious reader, Lee, Orwell, and Vonnegut got me into the complexity of people. Now I’m compelled to read (and write) stories centered on how experiences shape us as individuals, and as societies.
P.S. Shortly after my departure, archeologists found Roman ruins under that tiny English village.
A “fictional autobiography” that has really stuck with me, What is the What is based on the real-life experiences of Valentino Achak Deng, who survived the brutality and terror of Sudan’s second civil war.
At six or seven years old, he was separated from his parents when his village, Mariel Bai, was virtually wiped out by militia. Against all odds, he ultimately made it all the way to the United States, only to experience injustice, violence, and cruelty again.
Incredibly, the real story told in What is the What is one of hope and resilience, and it’s a powerful reminder that chance and circumstances are the only differences between us and anyone else on this planet. Gee, I don’t know… maybe we should all act accordingly?
P.S. Somewhat controversial for its “autobiographical” claim despite being novelized—some say appropriated—by another person, What is the What was required reading at numerous US…
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children —the so-called Lost Boys—was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom.
When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that…
As an English professor, I teach all kinds of literature, but I’m especially drawn to creative and experimental works that cross over different languages, cultures, and geographical regions. I’m drawn to writers who test the limits of language. Joseph Conrad chose to write in English, his third language (after Polish and French), which he learned from the polyglot world of sailing. Conrad’s English is populated by multiple other languages. When I discovered the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, I was compelled to learn both Dutch and Indonesian in order to read the prison notes, then available only in Dutch, and the many stories and novels not yet translated into English.
I love the way this book moves between Scotland and Sudan, as told from the perspective of a devout Muslim woman working as a translator for a Scottish academic at Aberdeen University. The story itself is a work of translation and a highly original rewriting of the encounter between East and West, Islam and Christianity, English and Arabic.
All those binaries break down: the English, for example, is Scottish, and the way to pronounce Arabic turns on a difference between Arab-speaking regions so that in both speech and writing, the reader encounters subtleties of translation usually overlooked in the tiresome cliches about “West” and “East.”
I love teaching it to learn with my students the politics of translation. The book has my favorite rewriting of that famous map-pointing scene at the beginning of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”—Aboulela restores as Arabic names the blank spaces on the map of…
A New York Times Notable Book: “Aboulela’s lovely, brief story encompasses worlds of melancholy and gulfs between cultures” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
American readers were introduced to the award-winning Sudanese author Leila Aboulela with Minaret, a delicate tale of a privileged young African Muslim woman adjusting to her new life as a maid in London. Now, for the first time in North America, we step back to her extraordinarily assured debut about a widowed Muslim mother living in Aberdeen who falls in love with a Scottish secular academic.
Sammar is a Sudanese widow working as an Arabic translator at a…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
In the 1950s, my mother and father left the red dirt of Oklahoma for the forests of Idaho to escape their families’ poverty. Instead of sharecropping, my father became a logger, but my aunt and her husband, a drilling rig roughneck, moved to the deserts of Saudi Arabia to work for Aramco and live in the American compound of Abqaiq. I remember the gifts they brought me: camel hide purses, Aladdin slippers. The Saudis, too, were experiencing rapid modernization and expanding wealth. I became fascinated by the conflict inherent in the sudden enmeshing of cultures and meteoric shift in power and privilege.
I planned to read this book for research but ended up so immersed in the story that I kept forgetting to take notes. The narrative, a “clever inversion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” follows the travels and travails of a young protagonist tangled in the contradictions of his African childhood, his formal education in England, and his return home with what he sees as the boon of modern thought. Part mystery, part romance, part history, part monomyth, part psychological thriller, the novel is set in an “unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between…tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement...” This book fascinated and haunted me even as it informed me about the complexities, dichotomies, and dissonance of colonization. Shot through with “allusions to Arabic and European fiction, Islamic history, Shakespeare, Freud, and classical Arabic poetry,” Salih’s novel should first be read for what it is: a brilliant work of art.
After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood—the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led…
I became interested in the art and written language of ancient Egypt due to its beauty and antiquity. Writing is art and art often contains text in this oldest written African language. I am fascinated with the process of religious change, intercultural interaction, and resistance to colonization. All of these themes are present in the study of the last functioning Egyptian temple, Philae, which is dedicated to the worship of Isis. What is often omitted from the history of this exceptional Egyptian temple is the fact that it was Nubians who defended and sustained the traditional religious practices long after most Egyptians had converted to Christianity. I wrote my book to research and share this neglected history.
A beautiful coffee table book, complete with stunning photographs by Chester Higgins, this publication includes maps, general articles about Nubia, and a gazetteer of stunning sites from Gebel Qeili and Naqa in the south to Philae, Elephantine, and Aswan in the North. The general articles range from art and architecture, kings and kingship, religion, texts, and women in ancient Nubia. This book is a beautiful and welcoming introduction to the vibrant land of ancient Nubia.
2012 American Publishers (PROSE) Awards winner for Best Archaeology & Anthropology Book For most of the modern world, ancient Nubia seems an unknown and enigmatic land. Only a handful of archaeologists have studied its history or unearthed the Nubian cities, temples, and cemeteries that once dotted the landscape of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Nubia’s remote setting in the midst of an inhospitable desert, with access by river blocked by impassable rapids, has lent it not only an air of mystery, but also isolated it from exploration. Over the past century, particularly during this last generation, scholars have begun to…
I have read adventure, crime, and thriller books all my life. Reading is a huge relaxation for me and a good novel will transport me from the stresses and strains of daily life into another place in my head. A place where I feel involved with the characters and the environment, a place where I can imagine I could be. A good storyteller is different from a crime writer. They take the reader on a journey that might be through history or different continents. A journey that the reader wants to travel as well. I try to emulate this in my writing.
Based on the true story of General Gordon and the siege of Khartoum, Smith weaves two of his protagonist families—the Courtneys and the Ballantynes—Into Sudan’s bloody Holy War against the charismatic new religious leader—Madhi.
I think Wilbur Smith is a brilliant storyteller, probably the best in my opinion. Almost all his novels are based in Africa and through his dozens of published books, he bases many around these two families. The Courtneys first appear in Smith’s first and possibly his most famous novel, Where the Lions Feed.
The families crop up in different guises and different generations and are always the protagonists. It was a great loss to my reading library when he died.
In the Sudan, decades of brutal misgovernment by the ruling Egyptian Khedive in Cairo precipitate a fierce and bloody rebellion and Holy War headed by a charismatic new religious leader, The Madhi or "Expected One". The British are forced to intervene to protect their national interests and to attempt to rescue the hundreds of British subjects stranded in the country. Along with hundreds of others, British trader and businessman, Ryder Courtney is trapped in the capital city of Khartoum. It is here that he meets Captain Penrod Ballantyne of the 10th Hussars, as well as the British Consul, David Benbrook…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Two books that I read as a young child were very important to me. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss made me think about riches, poverty, and the power that rich people have to make stupid rules; and poor people have no choice but to obey them. The Japanese Twins from Lucy Fitch Perkins' series on twins from different cultures gave me a life-long interest in cultural differences. Not only did they think differently, depending on their culture, they also had different skin colours. Later I learned about racism when I worked with unhappy displaced children and interpreted for asylum-seekers. I write from a child's perspective, making books accessible to all ages.
30,000 children some of whom were as young as six were orphaned and displaced from their homes when their villages were attacked in the Civil War. They met and banded together to trek across Sudan to Ethiopia and Kenya, looking for a new home. This was a journey of almost 1,000 miles. Thousands died on the way, but over 3,000 survived and many were resettled in America. I learned what can happen to children when their village is attacked and their parents killed. It's a fascinating story of perseverance and the importance of hope.
Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Honor, American Library Association (ALA) Notable Children's Book, Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) Best Children's Books of the Year: Outstanding Merit, Bank Street College of Education Notable Books for a Global Society, International Literacy Association (ILA) Children's Book Award Notable, International Literacy Association (ILA) Books Reflecting Diversity: - A Look Into a Wilder World, Bank Street College Children's Book Committee
Based on heartbreaking yet inspirational true events in the lives of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Brothers in Hope is a story of remarkable courage, and an amazing testament to the unyielding power…
