WINNER OF THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2017 "A remarkable debut." - The Huffington Post "Freewheeling and incendiary." - London Review of Books "...vibrant, wrenching debut novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood." - The New Yorker A Middle-Eastern capital caught in the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. A day in the life of a young man disillusioned with both East and West and struggling to find a place for himself in a society ruled by hypocrisy and contradictions. Rasa works as an interpreter for Western journalists by day and divides his nights between the Guapa, an underground nightclub where the city's clandestine LGBT community congregates, and his secret lover Taymour. Every night Taymour sneaks into the house Rasa shares with his overbearing grandmother, the woman who raised him. When she finds them in bed together on the eve of Taymour's wedding day, all hell breaks loose. That same day Rasa learns his best friend, the famous drag queen Majid, has been arrested by the police. Unable to go home, afraid for Majid's fate, and heartbroken by Taymour's determination to keep living a double life, Rasa's fragile balance collapses, while all around him the brief, intense season of public protest is cut short by the regime's repression and the rapid rise of the hard-line Islamist movement. "This immensely readable novel is fluent, passionate and emotionally honest. Equally astute in its analysis of Arab and American mores, the book's characters are nuanced and dynamic; it gives fresh life to the maxim 'the personal is political'." - The Guardian "Guapa offers an intimate, complex portrait of gay life in the Arab world, a subject rarely explored in fiction." - Gay Times

Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 - a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event - which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes - reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolation, to shape the country and its people? Will a lasting peace finally have been reached, or will future technology only amplify the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians? Covering a range of approaches - from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce - these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, peace treaties that span parallel universes, and even a Palestinian superhero, in probably the first anthology of science fiction from Palestine ever.

"Vierundzwanzig Stunden, die alles im Leben des jungen Rasa verandern: In einem namenlosen Land im Nahen Osten erschuttern gewaltsame Proteste die politische Ordnung. Der Arabische Fruhling steht am Scheideweg zwischen Militardiktatur und islamischem Regime. Und auch Rasas Welt gerat voellig aus den Fugen. Auf der Suche nach seinem besten Freund, der in den Gefangnissen der Machthaber gefoltert wird, streift er durch die Slums seiner Stadt. Nach Hause zu gehen wagt er nicht, denn seine Grossmutter hat sein unaussprechliches Geheimnis entdeckt. Wahrend die wichtigsten Beziehungen in seinem Leben zu zerbrechen drohen, muss Rasa seinen Platz in einer Gesellschaft finden, die ihn vielleicht niemals akzeptieren wird. Schonungslos und ergreifend erzahlt Saleem Haddad in seinem Debutroman von einer unmoeglichen Liebe in Zeiten radikaler Umbruche."