Egyptian author Youssef Rakha’s The Dissenters will be hitting shelves in February 2025. Published by Graywold Press, this transgressive novel is a portrait of Egypt’s history that challenges our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency. 

Through a fractal image of one Egyptian woman, known to her children as Mouna, The Dissenters explores a seventy-year span of Egyptian history. When Nour explores his mother’s attic following her death, he discovers sides of her life he never knew. These sides revealed three entirely separate women: Amna a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s; Nimo, a coquettish student of French, a self-made divorcee, and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab; and finally Mouna, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Nour begins writing fervently to his sister who has been estranged from their mother in an attempt to make sense of the woman they know as Mouna and the country in which they have grown up.The Dissenters will be Rakha’s first novel in written in English, although he is a prolific writer whose Arabic novels are widely available in translation. His writing delves into the intricate relationship between language, identity, and the Cairo context, drawing connections to the Arab-Islamic literary tradition and global literature. Renowned for his versatility, he has contributed significantly to Arabic and English literature through his essays, poems, and novels. His novel Paolo was on the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.

The novel, which has been widely praised by writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Yuri Herrera, is available for preorder: Graywolf | Bookshop | Amazon

We can’t wait to read it!