Novel
Gardens of the Night
سأهبك مدينة أخرى
Ahmed Fagih · 1991
Synopsis
Khalil al-Imam, a Libyan intellectual, is going through a nervous breakdown: black birds wheel above his head. The three novels that make up the whole follow his past, which shaped him, his present, divided between wakefulness and dejection, and a future that he only glimpses from afar, like Moses the promised land, through his loves, his exiles and the dreams that work on him.
Context
The three novels appeared in London in 1991 with Riad El-Rayyes, and the whole, more than five hundred pages, was translated into English in 1995 by Quartet under a single title. Each of the volumes corresponds to a time in the hero's life, the past, the present and the future, and critics read in it the fictionalisation of the cultural and social conflicts of a changing Libya, seen from a modernist middle class.
Who it is for
Three novels in one volume, in Arabic, translated into English but not into French; best read in order.
Prizes and reception
The Arab Writers Union included the trilogy among the one hundred and five best Arabic novels of the twentieth century, at sixteenth place.