The Middle East and Central Asia: Recent Fiction and Nonfiction Titles recommended by the Corte Madera Library
Fiction
The Bathhouse by Farnoosh Moshiri
Harrowing tale of a 17-year-old woman who endures life in an Iranian bathhouse used as a prison in the early 1980s during Khomeini's Shiite revolution.
The Cairo House: A Novel by Samia Serageldin
Having grown up in an affluent, land-owning family in Cairo, Egypt, during the reign of King Faruk and the pashas, Gigi finds her life changed when the old rule is taken over by Nasser.
The Day the Leader Was Killed by Naguib Mahfouz
An Egyptian middle class family narrates an ironic story leading up to the period of Anwar al-Sadat's assassination in 1981.
Ester's Child by Jean Sasson
A remarkable tale of three families: the Jewish Gales, the Palestinian Muslim Antouns, and the German gentile Kleists whose lives interweave for more than half a century after World War II.
Family Orchard: A Novel by Nomi Eve
History and fiction unite to create the family saga of six generations of Jews in Jerusalem beginning in 1837.
The Kill Artist by Daniel Silva
Ari Shamron, the head of Israeli intelligence, calls on former intelligence operative Gabriel Allon to thrwart a Palestinian plot to destroy the Middle East peace negotiations, a conspiracy linked to a Palestinian zealot with ties to Gabriel's past.
The Palace of Tears by Alev Croutier
Casimir de Chateauneuf is a successful vintner in 1868 Paris when he discovers a tiny portrait of a beautiful woman and is drawn into the Islamic world in his obsession with the picture.
The Same Sea by Amos Oz
The tensions among a wayward son, his widowed father, and the son's girlfriend are told in an unconventional story written in prose and poetry.
Strange Fire by Melvin Bukiet
Having a desire to discover exactly why he was shot by a bullet intended for the right wing Israeli Prime Minister, Kazakov begins an investigation that leads him into a web of conspiracies involving messianic Orthodox settlers, Arab terrorists and the Israeli Secret Service.
Nadia: Captive of Hope: Memoir of an Arab Woman by Fay Afaf Kanafan
Born in Beirut in 1918, Kanafani weaves together reflections on her personal struggle with an account of her extended family's dislocation in the violent political upheavals of the Middle East.
