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