Novel
The Story of Zahra
حكاية زهرة
Hanan al-Shaykh · 1980
Synopsis
As a child, Zahra serves as a pretext for her mother's meetings with another man, and her father, who suspects her part in it, beats her. Withdrawn into herself, she goes through affairs with no future, abortions and a depression, until her family sends her to West Africa to an exiled uncle. There she marries a Lebanese man settled there, and the marriage goes wrong. Back in Beirut, where the civil war has begun, she first seeks to live apart from the fighting.
Context
The novel was published in Beirut in 1980. It is divided into two parts, one before the civil war, the other during it, and deals frankly with abortion, divorce and sex outside marriage. Yves Gonzalez-Quijano translated it into French for Jean-Claude Lattès in 1985, a translation reissued by Actes Sud in 1999; the English version by Peter Ford appeared in London from Quartet in 1986. It is the first of its author's novels to be translated into English, and a Danish translation followed in 1990.
Who it is for
A harsh book, in which the father's violence, abortions and depression are told without concealment; in French since 1985.
Prizes and reception
Her greatest success, the one that made its author known beyond the Arab world.
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