TMR Book Club Discusses Youssef Rakha’s “The Dissenters”
April 27 @ 19:00 - 20:00
Free
This month, the TMR Book Club will be discussing Youssef Rakha’s debut novel, The Dissenters. We will meet online on Sunday, April 27th at 1pm EST/6pm UK/7pm CET.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
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.
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.
Published by Graywolf Press, 2025.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist, poet and critic working in both Arabic and English. His short story collection, Emissaries, is out from Barakunan. His first novel The Dissenters, is his first novel. He lives with his family in Cairo.
This online event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Learn about how you can support The Markaz Review.