Princess, priestess, runaway, slave-girl, heiress, aquatic siren: women live thousands of lives in the flash fiction of Riham Adly, sometimes in the course of one story. A writer from modern Egypt, Adly reflects the complex reality of a world that can be both cosmopolitan and insular, a changing world where women risk new roles, but still struggle to push through family and cultural conditioning that tells them to “expect nothing, stay quiet, be smart.” The women in these stories ignore that advice. They expect everything, rebel, push boundaries, speak from the heart.
Praise for Love is Make-Believe:
Love is Make-Believe is a rich compendium for Riham Adly's widely published, award-winning flash fiction and is not to be missed. This is a writer of vast range and imaginative powers. Her stories, most of which are set in Egypt, are evocative and compelling, sometimes violent, and all brilliantly written. Though they are brief, you'll want to take these stories in slowly. Immerse yourself in the lives of women and families rendered so intelligently and compassionately within, then keep this collection close at hand so you may re-enter the worlds Adly has so masterfully created. —Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
In Love is Make-Believe, Riham Adly has given us gems of flash and micro stories that crystallize the pursuit of love and safety while battling the unpredictability of chronic pain and the lack of stable relationships. Adly’s characters connect and break apart through attempts to staunch the pain of living, to use hope as sustenance to survive another day. But these stories move from gloom and darkness to beautiful images of characters taking agency, making mistakes, sure, but reckoning with these new lives just beyond the horizons. There’s so much to love in these unique and specific points of view and with writing that sings of disaster, but also of a gentler future. This book welcomes the reader in as a new family member, a cousin perhaps, with coffee in hand, ready to listen to the lives that surround us, that makes us who we are and who we shall be if we could only connect. Give Adly a few hours of your time and she’ll spin tales you’re unlikely to forget.” —Tommy Dean, author of Hollows
To say Riham Adly's flash fiction has the magnetic quality of a driving past a vehicle accident we cannot help but gape at would be trite, if not also true...which is to say, the entire world needs to look very carefully at this author's words, and take heed. Where there is pain; there is beauty. There is also rage, righteousness, and reckoning. Adly captures all this and more in a matter of paragraphs, as she renders all-too-real narratives on the page. If only stakes, obstacles, and obsessions such as these had been commonplace on the syllabi of my upbringing, it might not have taken me so long to open my heart. —Katey Schultz, author of Flashes of War and Still Come Home
Love is Make-Believe is a collection of 61 flash fiction stories from a master story-teller. Riham Adly has an impressive command of language that reaches deep into the reader’s mind and heart. Each story stands alone, some set in the past, present or future, others encompassing ancient and modern times, Adly’s country Egypt, and other countries, cultural expectations and identity crises. All are connected by a deep sense of loss, pain, family dysfunction and betrayal as the female characters strive to find a place for themselves in their world. — Sandra Arnold author of Soul Etchings and The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell
