Catalogue of a Private Life: Short Stories

By Najwa Bin Shatwan

A collection of short stories by one of the Arab world's most accomplished and acclaimed writers.

A grandmother who takes on a thief trying to seduce her daughters. A guard who fantasises about killing his general while locked in battle with a non-existent enemy. A film script about Libya's traffic problems improvised at a workshop. A woman's letter from her old school, which is now a makeshift refugee camp. A cow straying into a field, breaking an age-old truce between warring factions. The eight stories of Catalogue of a Private Life feel like oft-recounted folktales, where the ordinary has been softly twisted several degrees.

Najwa Bin Shatwan navigates the tensions between loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret, and tenderness and cruelty to weave a portrait of family, war and nation against a stark backdrop of the completely absurd.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1912868725
• ISBN13: 9781912868728
• Release Date: August 2022
• Publisher: Dedalus
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.9" x 7.6"