Synopsis
Sarah is on the brink of adulthood in her village in the mountains of Lebanon in the 1930s, a world hesitating on the verge of change. Her father the shaykh is uninterested in anything but the silkworms he's always raised; her conservative aunt worries only about the family's reputation, fearing that Sarah will take after her mother, who ran away twelve years ago and has been unheard of since. Sarah's brother dreams of going abroad, but each year finds himself still trapped in the family business. Around her the village—Druze and Christian, Lebanese and English—grows poorer, its traditions no longer able to sustain it. Sarah's hopes for the future have come to rely either on marriage, or finding the mother she can't remember.
In Younes's textured, lyrical prose, the story of one young woman's coming of age becomes a meditation on a nation's hardship, on home and freedom, hope and loss. Younes brings to intense life this lost world and the women at its center, whose lives have disappeared from history, from their own grasp.
About the Author
Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese novelist and freelance journalist. Her first novel Baa Mithl Beit Mithl Beirut (B for Bait for Beirut) received wide international acclaim and was translated into English, French and German. Wild Mulberries is her second novel. Her third novel, Haywat Okhra (Other Lives), will be released in Beirut in 2008 by Al Massar. Many of her short stories appeared in the cultural pages of Lebanese and Arabic newspapers and magazines such as Mulhak An Nahar, As Safir, Al Hasna’a, and Sayidati. Younes studied anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She wrote Neither Here Nor There: Narratives of the Families of the Disappeared in Lebanon and conducted and published studies on environmental and development issues of post-war Lebanon. Michelle Hartman is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Language at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Her main area of research is Modern Arabic Literature, specializing in Lebanese women's writing. She is the translator (with Maher Barakat) of Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib's acclaimed novel Just Like a River.
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