Arab American Authors Book List
Celebrating Arab American Heritage Month
I love finding good books from a wide range of authors and events like Arab American Heritage Month gives me the chance to focus on one group of authors. This month for Arab American Heritage Month I’m focusing on Arab American authors. I’ve read books by a couple of authors in this list and can’t wait to dive into the rest by these Arab American authors.
My grandmother gifted me a collection of Kahlil Gibran’s poems and he is definitely my favorite poetry writer.
From the back cover… Painter and poet, immigrant, rebel, global citizen, author of the beloved classic, The Prophet. Kahlil Gibran: Beyond Borders tells the inspiring saga of the artist’s life and creative vision Gibran’s story is one of overcoming barriers faced by many immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century—and still today. From his childhood and spiritual roots in Mount Lebanon to the city wilderness of urban America; from his apprenticeships in the creative circles of Boston, Beirut, Paris, and New York to his art and activism for “Greater Syria”; and from his friendships and loves to his emergence during the populist waves of the early 1900s as a people’s poet, Gibran crafted an art embracing a universal message that has become treasured in over forty languages. Exiled between the worlds and conflicts of the Middle East and the West, Gibran defied boundaries to assert a vision of an underlying humanity and faith that people share. This colorful, richly illustrated biography draws on a lifetime of dedicated, persistent research to bring Gibran’s compelling story into our time. It will make obsolete all previous accounts and will become the definitive study of this extraordinary and well-loved writer.
Haunting and eerie, Leave the World Behind paints a grim picture of what happens when society breaks down. I was given this book in 2020 and didn’t dare read it until 2021. Even so the similarities to the recent Covid-19 experience made the plot line even more hard to read. Still, I loved the interplay between character shaping and the dystopian backdrop. I haven’t watched the Netflix adaptation, but I’ve heard there are some character switches. I can’t wait to see the other changes. If you’ve read the book and seen the Netflix version, what are your impressions? Like the Netflix remake?
From the back cover… Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter.
But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?
I love fantasy, so this title stood out to me.
From the back cover… The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, home to djenn and ghuls, holy warriors and heretics, are at the boiling point of a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the mysterious master thief known as the Falcon Prince. In the midst of this brewing rebellion a series of brutal supernatural murders strikes at the heart of the Kingdoms. It is up to a handful of heroes to learn the truth behind these killings:
Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, “the last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat,” just wants a quiet cup of tea. Three score and more years old, he has grown weary of hunting monsters and saving lives, and is more than ready to retire from his dangerous and demanding vocation. But when an old flame’s family is murdered, Adoulla is drawn back to the hunter’s path.
Raseed bas Raseed, Adoulla’s young assistant, is a hidebound holy warrior whose prowess is matched only by his piety. But even as Raseed’s sword is tested by ghuls and manjackals, his soul is tested when he and Adoulla cross paths with the tribeswoman Zamia.
Zamia Badawi, Protector of the Band, has been gifted with the near-mythical power of the lion-shape, but shunned by her people for daring to take up a man’s title. She lives only to avenge her father’s death. Until she learns that Adoulla and his allies also hunt her father’s killer. Until she meets Raseed.
When they learn that the murders and the Falcon Prince’s brewing revolution are connected, the companions must race against time—and struggle against their own misgivings—to save the life of a vicious despot. In so doing they discover a plot for the Throne of the Crescent Moon that threatens to turn Dhamsawaat, and the world itself, into a blood-soaked ruin.
From the back cover… Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. A brilliant intergenerational tale of life and love seen through the eyes of three women from Raqqa. Set in Raqqa, this novel is a compelling tale that follows the charming, if at times difficult, everyday life of three women–Lamis, her mother Najwa, and her grandmother Karma–and all of the complexities of their relationships with each other, their extended family, and the wider social worlds they inhabit. The diversity of life in Syria, especially Raqqa, is on display throughout this book, and the stories told in its seven chapters move back and forth between time and place, with attention to the intimate details of lives and relationships, and with an eye to the larger historical and political contexts in which they live. An intergenerational novel, Summer with the Enemy traces the lives of these women not only in Raqqa where the bulk of the novel is set, but also in the places their families lived before–Turkey, Jerusalem, Aleppo, and Damascus. It reminds us that Syria and Syrians have never been isolated from the world, and that indeed the lives of people stretched far beyond the confines of Raqqa’s city limits, long before the online world existed.
From the back cover… Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, The Dispersal is a timely and insightful novel about displacement, loss, poetry, war, and migration from a leading Arab voice.
Tashari, the title of the novel in Arabic, is an Iraqi word for a shot from a hunting rifle, which scatters creatures in all directions. The word tashari expresses the scattering of Iraqis as a people across the globe and the separation from home and loved ones that pursues them.
The Dispersal, follows the career of Wardiyah Iskander, a physician working in the Iraq countryside in the 1950s. Delivering babies and tending to the many health needs of her rural women patients, she struggles to improve care for them. But as the years pass, the upheavals the country faces continue to worsen. Her family, like many others, is pressed to leave. Wardiyah finally goes, arriving in France. There her poet niece helps her now elderly aunt to get settled and, reflecting on their family’s dispersal, to tell her story.
Wardiyah develops a bond with her niece’s son Iskander, who has grown up in France alienated from his extended family, his language, and his culture. As he gets to know his great-aunt, the doctor, he learns more about his people’s calamities and extraordinary heritage. He is inspired to construct a virtual graveyard online, a digital resting place where families can be reunited again.
Inaam Kachachi’s unhurried, spontaneous reflection on the closest ties of family evokes quiet power and beauty, relayed by the warmth of Inam Jaber’s translation. Throughout it, Doctor Wardiyah’s journey conveys her dedication to the healing properties of trust and belonging, treasures lost whenever any homeland falls prey to the Beast of division and conflict.
One of the most recognizable horror books and films of the 1970s,The Exorcist follow-up, The Exorcist: Believer, was released in 2023, fifty years from the original. I’m not a horror fan, but if you are, if you haven’t read it, The Exorcist is a must read.
From the back cover…Georgetown, Washington D.C. Actress and divorced mother Chris MacNeil starts to experience ‘difficulties’ with her usually sweet-natured eleven-year-old daughter Regan. The child becomes afflicted by spasms, convulsions and unsettling amnesiac episodes; these abruptly worsen into violent fits of appalling foul-mouthed curses, accompanied by physical mutation. Medical science is baffled by Regan’s plight and, in her increasing despair, Chris turns to troubled priest and psychiatrist Damien Karras, who immediately recognises something profoundly malevolent in Regan’s distorted fetures and speech. On Karras’s recommendation, the Church summons Father Merrin, a specialist in the exorcism of demons . . .
The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman
Who doesn’t love a great, strong princess? I’m definitely a fan! I can’t wait to dive into this book!
From the back cover… Published in English for the first time, and the only Arabic epic named for a woman, The Tale of Princess Fatima recounts the thrilling adventures of a legendary medieval warrior universally known throughout the Middle East and long overdue to join world literature’s pantheon of female heroes.
A fearsome, sword-slinging heroine who defeated countless men in stealth attacks on horseback, Dhat al-Himma, or Princess Fatima, was secretly given away at birth because she wasn’t male, only to triumph as the most formidable warrior of her time. Known alternately as she-wolf, woman of high resolve, and calamity of the soul, she lives on in this rousing narrative of female empowerment, in which she leads armies of more than seventy thousand men in clashes between rival tribes and between Muslims and Christians; reconciles with her father after taking him prisoner; and fends off her infatuated cousin, who challenges her to a battle for the right to marry her. Though her cousin suffers an ignominious defeat, he impregnates Fatima against her will and, when she gives birth to a Black son, disowns his own son, who also grows up to be a great warrior, eventually avenging his mother’s honor. The epic culminates in a showdown between Fatima and another formidable woman warrior, and earns Fatima a place alongside the likes of Circe, Mulan, Wonder Woman, Katniss Everdeen and other powerful women.
You had me at three teens determined to save their local bookstore!
From the back cover… Set over the course of one day, Aminah Mae Safi’s This Is All Your Fault is a smart and voice-driven YA novel that follows three young women determined to save their indie bookstore.
Rinn Olivera is finally going to tell her longtime crush AJ that she’s in love with him.
Daniella Korres writes poetry for her own account, but nobody knows it’s her.
Imogen Azar is just trying to make it through the day.
When Rinn, Daniella, and Imogen clock into work at Wild Nights Bookstore on the first day of summer, they’re expecting the hours to drift by the way they always do. Instead, they have to deal with the news that the bookstore is closing. Before the day is out, there’ll be shaved heads, a diva author, and a very large shipment of Air Jordans to contend with.
And it will take all three of them working together if they have any chance to save Wild Nights Bookstore.
From the back cover… Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees her, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri’s father with whom Mona falls in love and whom she eventually marries. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he wishes his father would disappear.
Nuri will, however, soon regret what he wished for. His father, long a dissident in exile from his homeland, is taken under mysterious circumstances. And, as the world that Nuri and his stepmother share is shattered by events beyond their control, they begin to realize how little they knew about the man they both loved.
Anatomy of a Disappearance is written with all the emotional precision and intimacy that have won Hisham Matar tremendous international recognition. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, he When a loved one disappears, how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?
From the back cover… Red is the blood of the elite, of magic, of control.
Blue is the blood of the poor, of workers, of the resistance.
Clear is the blood of the slaves, of the crushed, of the invisible.
Sylah dreams of days growing up in the resistance, being told she would spark a revolution that would free the empire from the red-blooded ruling classes’ tyranny. That spark was extinguished the day she watched her family murdered before her eyes.
Anoor has been told she’s nothing, no one, a disappointment, by the only person who matters: her mother, the most powerful ruler in the empire. But when Sylah and Anoor meet, a fire burns between them that could consume the kingdom—and their hearts.
Hassa moves through the world unseen by upper classes, so she knows what it means to be invisible. But invisibility has its uses: It can hide the most dangerous of secrets, secrets that can reignite a revolution. And when she joins forces with Sylah and Anoor, together these grains of sand will become a storm.
As the empire begins a set of trials of combat and skill designed to find its new leaders, the stage is set for blood to flow, power to shift, and cities to burn.
From the back cover… A deeply moving family story about identity, faith, and belonging set in the Muslim immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan
It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate from high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents’ roof. But the twins’ expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother’s return from prison, and his mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.
Meanwhile, outside the family’s apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone’s motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know whom to trust?
From the back cover… A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt’s secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage.
In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of all Rummani lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.
Decades later, Betty returns to her Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s every known or should she follow her heart for the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family emigrate to the U.S. But as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.
The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and even wield the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.
Happy reading!
Tricia/Maria Jane
Tricia Copeland believes in finding magic. She thinks magic infuses every aspect of our lives, whether it is the magic of falling in love, discovering a new passion, a beautiful sunset, or a book that transports us to another world. An avid runner and Georgia native, Tricia now lives with her family and four-legged friends in Colorado. Find all her titles from contemporary romance and fantasy, to dystopian fiction at www.triciacopeland.com and her new adult romances under author Maria Jane at mariajaneromance.com.