Sign up to get Today’s Best Articles in your inbox
Join 350,000+ subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of
The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Leila Aboulela's book recommendations
The prolific novelist recommends works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Daphne du Maurier, and more
When I was 10 years old, my family set out on a safari at Dinder National Park in eastern Sudan. The drive through jungles, sleeping in a hut, seeing lions and giraffes — all that faded into the background with the first line of the novel I had carried along: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
The Egyptian revolution of 1952 sweeps civil servant Isa aside; he loses his job and his fiancée dumps him. Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, details Isa's fall on the wrong side of history — all of this against the bleak backdrop of a wintry windswept Alexandria, empty of holidaymakers.
In a crumbling leafy bungalow in India, a dutiful daughter is restricted by her bad luck and selfish parents. This is juxtaposed against the culture shock felt by her brother, a student in the U.S. who is staying with a family in which the only daughter has an eating disorder. This is Desai at her most beautiful and insightful.
Sign up to get Today’s Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the day’s biggest news and analysis – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Raskolnikov, the poor student, justifies to himself the murder of an old woman, a pawnbroker. A powerful theological warning against the arrogance of reason, Crime and Punishment is a big novel on the meaning of life. But it's also gritty, gripping, and its depiction of city life gives it a modern feel. In addition to all that, Raskolnikov is the coolest hero ever.
Against the odds, a village idiot with two teeth left in his head ends up marrying the village's most beautiful girl. Rooted in tradition and Islamic mysticism, this novella is a quintessentially Sudanese classic.
In a post-apocalyptic England, an elderly woman still reeling from an event that everyone calls "the crisis" is given a 12-year-old girl to look after. As the physical world disintegrates around them, the walls in the woman's apartment dissolve and she is able to enter evolving visionary worlds of extraordinary vividness, worlds where the past and future come together.
