Author of
An Unlasting Home (Custom House, 2022)
The Hidden Light of Objects (Bloomsbury/Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2014)
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 literature from Brown University and is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Kuwait University. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, The First Line, After the Pause, World Literature Today, The Blog of the LA Review of Books, on the BBC World Service, and in the anthology, Novel of the World. Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2014 First Book Award. She divides her time between Kuwait and Greece.
Mai Al-Nakib
Books by Mai
An Unlasting Home (Custom House, 2022)
The debut novel from an award-winning short story writer: a multigenerational saga spanning Lebanon, Iraq, India, the United States, and Kuwait that brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women.
In 2013, Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she always thought she would leave, and a country she recognizes less and less, and yet a certain inertia keeps her there. But when teaching Nietzsche in her Intro to Philosophy course leads to an accusation of blasphemy, which carries with it the threat of execution, Sara realizes she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all. Interspersed with Sara’s narrative are the stories of her grandmothers: beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in the old city of Kuwait and swept off her feet to an estate in India by the son of a successful merchant family; and her two mothers: Noura, who dreams of building a life in America and helping to shape its Mid-East policies, and Maria, who leaves her own children behind in Pune to raise Sara and her brother Karim and, in so doing, transforms many lives. Ranging from the 1920s to the near present, An Unlasting Home traces Kuwait’s rise from a pearl-diving backwater to its reign as a thriving cosmopolitan city to the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable epic and a spellbinding family saga.
The Hidden Light of Objects (Bloomsbury/Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2014)
A young girl, renamed Amerika in honor 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 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 may see another side of life in the Middle East—adolescent love, yearnings for independence, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib’s luminous stories capture overlooked moments in the lives of those who live in this fraught region of the world—and the power of ordinary objects to hold extraordinary memories.