Before the Queen Falls Asleep

(Paperback)

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Description

Born a girl to parents who expected a boy, Jihad grows up treated like the eldest son, wearing boy's clothing and sharing the financial burden of head of the household with her father.

Now middle-aged, each night Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life. As Malika prepares to leave home to attend university abroad, her mother revisits the past of their Palestinian family, tenderly describing their life in exile in Kuwait and her own experiences of love and loss as she grows up.

Huzama Habayeb weaves a richly observed and affectionate portrait of a Palestinian family displaced from their homeland, exploring with humour and poise the love and betrayal that pursues Jihad and her family from Kuwait to Jordan to Dubai. This is a novel whose words will resound long after you finish the final page.

Translated from the Arabic by Kay Heikkinen

Reviews

A brilliant novel of the Palestinian diaspora. Funny and gritty, and bursting with life and humour. -- Ahdaf Soueif * Guardian *

Author Bio

Huzama Habayeb is a Palestinian author and journalist. She was born in Kuwait, where she lived and worked as a journalist until she was forced to leave by the Gulf War. She settled in Jordan, establishing her reputation first as a short story writer, publishing her four prizewinning collections between 1992 and 2001, before publishing her first novel in 2007. Her first novel to be translated into English, Velvet, won the 2017 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Before the Queen Falls Asleep is her second novel to be translated into English.