Purchase

Amazon

Kindle

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Add to Wish List

Also by Rabih Alameddine:

An Unnecessary Woman, February 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
The Hakawati, June 2009
Paperback

AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN
By: Rabih Alameddine

Grove Press
February 2014
On Sale: February 4, 2014
320 pages
ISBN: 0802122140
EAN: 9780802122148
Kindle: B00ET7PJL0
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Fiction

One of the Middle East’s most celebrated voices, Rabih Alameddine follows his international bestseller, The Hakawati, with an enchanting story of a book-loving, obsessive, seventy-two-year-old “unnecessary” woman.

Aaliya Saleh lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family’s “unnecessary appendage.” Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read—by anyone.

In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman’s late-life crisis, readers follow Aaliya’s digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut. Colorful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya’s own volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.

A love letter to literature and its power to define who we are, the prodigiously gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of one woman's life in the Middle East.

Media Buzz

Morning Edition - October 15, 2014
All Things Considered - February 4, 2014
Fresh Air - NPR - January 31, 2014
All Things Considered - January 5, 2014