Banipal's next Bookclub is on Wednesday 24 April.

We will be discussing

Shadow of the Sun

with its author Taleb Alrefai 
and its translator Nashwa Nasreldin

Impoverished Egyptian teacher Helmy is desperate to find a better life for himself, his wife and little boy, seeing no future at home in Cairo. He dreams of working in oil-rich Kuwait and its boom in construction being the answer. He manages to borrow the huge cost of a visa and is at last on his way to Kuwait, but has no idea of the hellish nightmare that awaits him.

Click to read more about the book

Shadow of the Sun (2000 & 2012, Dhil al-Shams) was Taleb Alrefai's first novel, centring on the suffering of Egyptian and other foreign migrant workers in Kuwait.  Since then he has written a number of novels, including The Mariner, published by Banipal Books in 2020.  In 2011 he founded Al-Multaqa (Cultural Circle), a regular fortnightly literary discussion forum in Kuwait City, where he lives, which led to the founding in December 2015 of the now highly successful annual AlMultaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story. For more on Taleb Alrefai, click here. 

Nashwa Nasreldin is a British Egyptian writer, editor, and translator of Arabic literature into English. She is the translator of the 2014 Sheikh Zayed Book Award-winning novel After Coffee by Abdelrashid Mahmoudi, with her translation being a Fiction finalist in the 2019 USA International Book Awards. For more about Nashwa Nasreldin, click here.

• Order online or from any good bookshop
• from Inpress Books, paperback edition (click here)
• for the paperback directly from Banipal Books with PayPal, click here

• For more information, click here

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ALL WELCOME

Please email bookclub@banipal.co.uk to request the Zoom Login.

If you like, do also use Facebook Messenger to tell us you'd like to join the discussion.

The Book Club Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/BanipalBookClub/

The Zoom Login will be emailed out on Monday 22 April 2024
to everyone who has emailed/messaged to attend.