Ibrahim Al-Koni

"Imagine Cormac McCarthy's savage lyricism in a Paul Bowles desert landscape and you begin to enter the bleakly beautiful world of this mesmerizing, fable-like novel."--The Independent Gold Dust is a classic story of the brotherhood between man and beast, the thread of companionship that is all the difference between life and death in the desert. It is a story of the fight to endure in a world of limitless and waterless wastes, and a parable of the struggle to survive in the most dangerous landscape of all: human society. Rejected by his tribe and hunted by the kin of the man he killed, Ukhayyad and his thoroughbred camel flee across the desolate Tuareg deserts of the Libyan Sahara. Between bloody wars against the Italians in the north and famine raging in the south, Ukhayyad rides for the remote rock caves of Jebel Hasawna. There, he says farewell to the mount who has been his companion through thirst, disease, lust, and loneliness. Alone in the desert, haunted by the prophetic cave paintings of ancient hunting scenes and the cries of jinn in the night, Ukhayyad awaits the arrival of his pursuers and their insatiable hunger for blood and gold.

Gold Dust

The Bleeding of the Stone

International Booker Prize finalist and "one of the Arab world's most innovative novelists" (Roger Allen) delivers a brilliant retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during the Middle Ages The year is 693 and a tense exchange, mediated by an interpreter, takes place between Berber warrior queen al-Kahina and an emissary from the Umayyad General Hassan Ibn Numan. Her predecessor had been captured and killed by the Umayyad forces some years earlier, but she will go on to defeat Ibn Numan's forces. The Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during the Middle Ages, narrated from the perspective of the conquered peoples. Written in Ibrahim al-Koni's unique and enchanting voice, his lyrical and deeply poetic prose speaks to themes that are intensely timely. Through the wars and conflicts of this distant, turbulent era, he addresses the futility of war, the privilege of an elite few at the expense of the many, the destruction of natural habitats and indigenous cultures, and questions about literal and fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts. Al-Koni's masterly account of conquest and resistance is both timeless and timely, infused with a sense of disaster and exile--from language, the desert, and homeland.

The Night Will Have Its Say

Ibrāhīm Kūnī

Ibrahim Kuni

May Jayyusi

The moufflon, a wild sheep prized for its meat, continues to survive in the remote mountain desert of southern Libya. Only Asouf, a lone bedouin who cherishes the desert and identifies with its creatures, knows exactly where it is to be found. Now he and the moufflon together come under threat from hunters who have already slaughtered the once numerous desert gazelles. The novel combines pertinent ecological issues with a moving portrayal of traditional desert life and of the power of the human spirit to resist.

Marina Warner

Myths and legends have often been inspired and shaped by geologic landforms and similarly, British photographer David Parker uses the natural world as an arena for the personal exploration of new mythic, symbolic, and metaphoric motifs, a theme he previously developed in the award winning book The Phenomenal World (2001). For Parker the siren song is a call to contemplation, and his pictures chart many fascinated encounters with an enchanted world of forgotten archetypes, further exploring the tension between the temporal and eternal in our secular age.

Ibrahim Al-Koni

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