Cry in a Long Night (Paperback)

A lost classic of Arabic literature—lyrical, searching, and fiercely modern.
Originally published in 1955, Cry in a Long Night marked the stunning debut of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, one of the most influential literary figures of the Arab world. Called "one of the principal successes of Arabic artistic prose and drama" by Edward Said, this groundbreaking novel introduced stream of consciousness, flashback, and interior monologue to Arabic fiction—redefining what the Arabic novel could be.
On a fateful night in an unnamed city, Amin Samaa sets out on foot toward the home of Inayat Yasser, an aristocratic heiress who has enlisted his help in writing the history of her fading Ottoman family. As he walks, memories surge: of his childhood in a rural village, the slums his family fled to after his father's death, and above all, of his wife Sumaya, whose sudden disappearance two years earlier still haunts him. When she reappears unexpectedly, Amin is forced to confront not only his past but the painful choices that will determine his future.
Written just two years before the 1948 Nakba and steeped in the disquiet of a world on the brink, Cry in a Long Night captures a society—and a soul—in transition. With the emotional depth of D. H. Lawrence, the interior wanderings of James Joyce, and the sharp irony of early Aldous Huxley, Jabra crafts a psychological and political portrait that is as poignant now as when it first appeared.
This landmark novel, available for the first time in English in a luminous new translation, is essential reading for anyone interested in modernist fiction, Palestinian literature, or the evolution of the Arabic novel.

William Tamplin is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he earned his PhD in 2020. He is the author of Poet of Jordan: The Political Poetry of Muhammad Fanatil al-Hajaya (Leiden: Brill, 2018).