Novel
طيور أيلول
Not translated into English
Emily Nasrallah · 1962
Synopsis
In a village in the Lebanese countryside, the future is narrow and the young people leave one after another for the city or abroad. Those who remain live under the rule of custom, which governs marriages, stifles love affairs and subjects women to the authority of men. The novel looks at this world with tenderness and without complacency, and follows the departures from the side of those they leave behind.
Context
The first novel by its author, the book was published in Beirut in 1962. She draws on the history of members of her family who left for abroad, and the novel shows a double uprooting: that of those who leave, then that of those who return and find neither their home nor themselves as they had left them. In the year of its publication it received three literary prizes: the prize for best novel, the Said Akl Prize and the prize of the Friends of the Book.
Who it is for
In Arabic, with no French or English translation; a novel of village life and departures, more attentive to manners than to action.
Prizes and reception
The first book of a novelist to whom the Goethe-Institut awarded its medal in 2017, shortly before her death.
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