A biographic novel that captures the tempestuous and moving life of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. The life of Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) coincided with turbulent years in Russian history. She was an eminent Russian poet and a passionate lover involved with several men at the same time, including Rilke, who chose Lou Andreas-Salome over her, and Pasternak, who married someone else, but protected her until her death. Her life included many trials such as her poverty during the grueling Russian civil war, her young daughter's death from hunger in an orphanage, and the death of her husband, who fought against the Communist regime and was executed by the Soviet state. Rejected by official poets, then by the wealthy Russian diaspora in France, she finally returned to her country to end her wandering life. She hanged herself from a rope in an attic from which she could see the field where she had dug with bare hands for potatoes abandoned by local farmers. A poet-martyr of the Stalinist era-buried in an unmarked plot in the cemetery of Yelabuga-Tsvetaeva is brought to life in this poetic biographical novel by celebrated Lebanese author Venus Khoury-Ghata.

The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile with his wife. Stalin, "the Kremlin mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer," is undoubtedly responsible for his fatal decline. From the depths of his prison cell, lost in a world full of ghosts, Mandelstam sees scenes from his life pass before him: constant hunger, living hand to mouth, relying on the assistance of sympathetic friends, shunned by others, four decades of creation and struggle, alongside his beloved wife Nadezhda, and his contemporaries Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and many others. With her sensitive prose and innate sense of drama, French-Lebanese writer Venus Khoury-Ghata brings Mandelstam back to life and allows him to have the last word-proving that literature is one of the surest means to fight against barbarism.

In a remote community on the edge of a windswept desert, a woman has been condemned to death by stoning. Steeped in the harsh values of her traditional, patriarchal society, Noor accepts her fate. When an aid worker befriends her, urging her to defend herself and her unborn child, the two women form a bond. Together with Amina, Noor's outspoken friend, they struggle to defy the law. Written in prose imbued with the rhythms and images of the author's native language, Arabic, this is a tale of the bonds of female friendships, solidarity and empowerment in a society where a woman's voice, especially in the public sphere, has been denied.

Poetry is one of the major forms of literary expression in both Africa and the Arab World and this anthology endeavours to provide the reader with a glimpse of the most representative voices of the poetic movements, and generations, in the French-speaking countries of these two regions, at the same time as doing away with the divisions and distinctions between the countries of Africa. The poets anthologized here - from North Africa, Sub Saharan Africa and the Arab World - have long wished to escape from artificial pigeon-holing and rather to be associated with common threads. The past half-century has confirmed their work as poetry of great literary quality, full of a unique vitality and presence, and this anthology enables an English-speaking readership to discover and savour these distinctive voices