In The Night Will Have Its Say, author Ibrahim Al-Koni, anInternational Booker Prize finalist and, as Roger Allen says “one of the Arab world’s most innovative novelists”, delivers a brilliant retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa.

The year is 693 and a tense exchange, mediated by an interpreter, takes place between Berber warrior queen al-Kahina and an emissary from the Umayyad General Hassan ibn Nu’man. Her predecessor had been captured and killed by the Umayyad forces some years earlier, but she will go on to defeat them.

The Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during the seventh century CE, narrated from the perspective of the conquered peoples. Written in Ibrahim al-Koni’s unique and enchanting voice, his lyrical and deeply poetic prose speaks to themes that are intensely timely. Through the wars and conflicts of this distant, turbulent era, he addresses the futility of war, the privilege of an elite few at the expense of the many, the destruction of natural habitats and indigenous cultures, and questions about literal and fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts.

Ibrahim Al-Koni’s masterly account of conquest and resistance is both timeless and timely, infused with a sense of disaster and exile—from language, the desert, and homeland.

At the publisher's link, you can also read an extract and check out where to buy a copy.
The book is published in Hardback, paperback and ebook editions

Ibrahim al-Koni was born in Libya in 1948. A Tuareg who writes in Arabic, he spent his childhood in the desert and learned to read and write Arabic when he was twelve. His novels Anubis (2005), Gold Dust (2008), and The Seven Veils of Seth (2009) were published by the American University in Cairo Press, and another novel, The Bleeding of the Stone, has also appeared in English. In 2008 he received the Sheikh Zayed Award for Literature for his novel Nida’ ma kan ba‘idan (Calling the distant).

In 2010, he received in Cairo the Arab Novel Award and dedicated the value of the prize to the children of the Tuareg tribes from which he originally hails. William M. Hutchins, emeritus professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at Appalachian State University, is the translator of Ibrahim al-Koni’s Anubis (AUC Press, 2005).

Nancy Roberts is an award-winning translator of contemporary Arab authors, including Ghada Samman, Salwa Bakr, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Laila Aljohani, and Ahlem Mosteghanemi. Her translations include, most recently the book above, as well as Things I Left Behind by Shada Mustafa (Banipal Books, 2022), whose Arabic original was shortlisted for the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Children's Literature category. Also, The Slave Yards by Najwa Bin Shatwan, Syracuse University Press, 2020, whose Arabic original was shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Salwa Bakr’s The Man from Bashmour (AUC Press, 2007), for which she received a commendation in the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses and Gaza Weddings (both Hoopoe Fiction), for which she shared the 2018 Sheikh Hamad Award for translation. For more about Nancy Roberts, click here.

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