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A Novel
by Youssef Rakha
A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history.
Certain as I've never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.
Amna, Nimo, Mouna―these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a "pious mama" donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister―who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years―in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.
Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.
"Unflinching in the portrayal of women's bodies mobilized in protest, The Dissenters is a complex novel about womanhood, political resistance, and personal history." —Foreword Reviews
"Youssef Rakha is the rare writer who is actually paying attention and trying to make sense of the world while many are devolving into despair. In The Dissenters, revolutions and their aftermath play the chord of unsung protagonists of History—not of the ones creating and disseminating grandiose lies and killing for them, but the ones willing to create a world outside the tinted windows of power, even if that means challenging the abyss." —Yuri Herrera
"The Dissenters is an encyclopedia of all the ways bodies are imprisoned or made free―by politics, sex, power, love, death. An Egypt of the senses, mind and heart, laid open and dissected in every manner. This book will seduce you from its opening pages and stun you with its last. A tremendous, confident novel from Youssef Rakha, assuming his rightful place on the literary stage." ―Bina Shah
"The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lifestyles set them on a collision course with Egypt's military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath."―Amitav Ghosh
This information about The Dissenters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Youssef Rakha is a novelist, poet, essayist and journalist who writes in both Arabic and English. His interests include the role of obscenity in Arab society and the possibility of a post-Muslim perspective. His first two novels The Book of the Sultan's Seal and The Crocodiles appeared in English in early 2015. Frequently anthologized and translated into many languages, he has written widely on Arabic literature and Egyptian history.
Youssef's 2006 photo travelogue Beirut Shi Mahal was nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. He was among the 39 best Arab writers under 40 selected for the Hay Festival Beirut39 Festival in 2010. His first novel, The Book of the Sultan's Seal, won the 2015 Banipal Seif Ghobash Prize for Paul Starkey's translation, and his third, Paulo, was on the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.
Born, raised and based in Cairo, Youssef graduated from Hull University, England, in 1998. He has worked as a cultural journalist, literary translator, and creative writing coach since then. He founded and edits тнє ѕυℓтαη'ѕ ѕєαℓ: Cairo's Coolest Cosmopolitan Hotel, a bilingual online space.
Youssef's writing is featured in many web and print publications including the Atlantic, BOMB, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, and the New York Times. He has been interviewed in, among many others, Music and Literature, Reuters and Words Without Borders, and his work is celebrated in Granta, The New York Review of Books, Reorient, Full Stop, and many others.
His work has prompted appearances in, among many other events across the world, the Hay Festival in the UK (2011), the Ritratti di Poesia in Rome (2015), the Internationales Literaturfestival Leukerbad in Switzerland (2016), La Comédie du livre in Montpellier, France (2017), and Dubai's Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature's anniversary round (2018). He has judged film as well as writing competitions, and is on the jury of the True Story Award.
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