Catalogue of a Private Life - Najwa Bin Shatwan (Author) - Sawad Hussain (Translator)

ISBN: 978-1-912868-72-8

By: Najwa Bin Shatwan

Illustrated by: Hassân Almohtasib

Translated by: Sawad Hussain

Year of Publishing: 2021

Publisher: Dedalus Limited

Page Numbers: 94 Pages

Cover: Paperback

A collection of short stories by one of the Arab world’s most accomplished and acclaimed writers.

A grandmother who takes on a thief trying to seduce her daughters.

A guard who fantasises about killing his general while locked in battle with a non-existent enemy.

A film script about Libya’s traffic problems improvised at a workshop.

A woman’s letter from her old school, which is now a makeshift refugee camp.

A cow straying into a field, breaking an age-old truce between warring factions.

The eight stories of Catalogue of a Private Life feel like oft-recounted folktales, where the ordinary has been softly twisted several degrees.

Najwa Bin Shatwan navigates the tensions between loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret, and tenderness and cruelty to weave a portrait of family, war and nation against a stark backdrop of the completely absurd.