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New fiction: The Cinderellas of Muscat by Huda Hamed
Translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti
- The day the female jinn disappear from the streets of Oman’s capital Muscat
- A modern feminist fable
- Story-telling Cinderellas give a new twist to Shaharazad’s nightly tales
- Blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, tradition and modern life
Where did they go to? Have they all died, are they in hiding after losing out to electricity and cement, to air conditioners and televisions? Has life lost its playfulness and joy without the transformational powers of the jinn? Are its sweet moments of pleasure and sensual delight no more, now families are weighed down with daily chores, boring work, and all the routines apparently necessary for modern life? It seems so, until a group of enterprising women, all overburdened with one thing after another, decide that they have to somehow take on the powers of the lost female jinn.
Zubayda and a group of women become jinn themselves in the guise of beautiful Cinderellas. Their individual stories reveal their innermost thoughts, thoughts they don't and can't share with their husbands and other family members or even neighbours. The stories of the Cinderellas unwittingly show the existence of two worlds, the public one with all its social restrictions, societal taboos, which they live with daily, and their own secret, untellable one in which they can break free and speak aloud their true opinions and feelings when they become the jinn Cinderellas.
Though not searching for a prince, they meet together in Chef Ramon’s restaurant on Muscat’s beachfront for a few hours of independence until midnight strikes. Nothing can stop the flow of story-telling. The stories pour out one after the other like crystal grains, bouncing off each other and scattering.
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Chip Rossetti is a translator of contemporary fiction by Arab authors, who include Mohamed Makhzangi, Diaa Jubaili, Sonallah Ibrahim, Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, Magdy Elshafee, Reem al-Kamali and now Huda Hamed. He is editorial director of the NYU Press’s Library of Arabic Literature bilingual book series.
You can read more about the book here, and read an excerpt.
Available in paperback and eBook editions
Published Date - 07/05/2025
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