We will meet to discuss “The Hidden Light of Objects” by Mai Al-Nakib online on Sunday, April 26 at 1 pm EDT/19:00 CET. The author will also be in attendance.

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A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country’s growing hostility towards the West. A self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two belligerent classmates. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. A Kuwaiti woman returns to her family after being held captive in Iraq for a decade. The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived – adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib’s luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people – and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait and spent the first six years of her life in London; Edinburgh; and St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University and was an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University for twenty years. Her short-story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2014. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Ninth Letter, The First Line, World Literature Today, Rowayat, and The Markaz Review. She lives in Kuwait.

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