Novel
ليالي نجمة
Not translated into English
Khalifa Hussein Mustafa · 1999
Synopsis
ليالي نجمة (The Nights of Najma): in Tripoli, in the fifties, a brothel in Sidi Omrane street, on the margins of the city, shelters Najma, a prostitute, and other women whose intertwined destinies the novel follows. Several voices in turn tell of those years when Libya, emerging from British administration, became an independent kingdom under the Senussi monarchy.
Context
The novel appeared in Tripoli in 1999, in two volumes, from al-Dar al-Jamahiriya. Its author had already published al-Matar wa-khuyul al-tin in 1981 and Ayn al-shams in 1983, which the Arab Writers Union chose among the hundred best Arabic novels of the twentieth century. Ali Ahmida places it in a body of work that openly criticises the traditional values of Libyan society. The book is still studied in Libya: in 2025 Fawzi al-Haddad analysed its fragmented narrative, its plurality of voices and the place it gives to the body and to the margins of the city.
Who it is for
For discovering the Tripoli of independence seen from its margins, in a major Libyan novel, untranslated.
Prizes and reception
Ali Ahmida holds it to be the longest and best constructed of its author's five novels.
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