Keynote
A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history
Book Title
The Dissenters
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- “The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lives set them on a collision course with Egypt's military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath.”—Amitav Ghosh
Body
Certain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.
Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.
Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.
Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.
Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.
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About the Author
Credit: Bassam El Zoghby
Praise
- “One of the most original and inventive writers of his generation.”—Omar Robert Hamilton
- “The Dissenters is an encyclopedia of all the ways bodies are imprisoned or made free—by politics, sex, power, love, death. An Egypt of the senses, mind, and heart, laid open and dissected in every manner. This book will seduce you from its opening pages and stun you with its last. A tremendous, confident novel from Youssef Rakha, assuming his rightful place on the literary stage.”—Bina Shah
- “With thrilling prose and a narrative that flows as relentless as the Nile, Youssef Rakha takes us on the big dipper of Egyptian history from Nasser to now. The Dissenters is by turns haunted, horrifying, and hilarious.”—Tim Mackintosh-Smith
