The Hidden Light of Objects
About the Book
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 PhD in English from Brown University and is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University. Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2014. Her fiction and essays have appeared in various publications, including Ninth Letter, The First Line, After the Pause, World Literature Today, and the BBC World Service. She lives in Kuwait and is working on her second novel.
Reviews
‘The old world and the new. The strife in the Gulf, once peaceful and reflective. East and West, Arabic and English, the poetry of the heart, the eye of the hawk; all these elements produce the lustrous pearls of Mai Al-Nakib’s short stories.’ Hanan al-Shaykh
‘With her compassion for an old, vanished world and her exceptional eye for the bruised landscape of the modern Middle East, Al-Nakib should be heralded as an exciting new literary voice.’ The National
‘Al-Nakib writes with penetrating insight and such compressed lyricism that at times her prose seems to border on poetry. It's a densely imagined and beautifully written debut.’ The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Through a richly nuanced and generous lens, Al-Nakib’s gracefully intertwined stories celebrate the living desire that connects us to home – wherever in the world that might be – as well as to the past and to each other. A powerful voice already in full mastery of her powers. The most original first collection of short fiction I have read in years.' A. Manette Ansay
‘Mai Al-Nakib’s The Hidden Light of Objects brings forth both the light and the shadows of the contemporary Middle East in clean-edged prose that startles us, not with sudden violence or polemic, but with the ineluctable force of human desire. Kuwait itself becomes a character, full of contradictions, in this multifaceted set of stories and vignettes. Superb.’ Lucy Ferriss
‘These moments examined, small and beautiful and finely drawn, evoke a world of loss, of longing, and remembrance. Mai Al-Nakib’s debut collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, reveals the life before and after, old and new, innocent and wise, becoming. Beautiful.’ M. Evelina Galang
‘In this, her first collection of stories, Kuwaiti author Mai Al-Nakib excavates meaning from the overlooked and the unremarked. In ten tales, interspersed by linking vignettes, she shows how, in the midst of mayhem and strife, people get on with their lives. War, disaster, and religious conflict are all present here but the author keeps the focus on the individual and, as in life, private joy and grief loom larger than news items. The Hidden Light of Objects marks the emergence of an author already confident in her craft and her ability to give voice to the emotions and yearnings of her characters.’ New Internationalist
