The Dissenters: A Novel

by Youssef Rakha

Overview

A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history

Certain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.

Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644453193
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	02/04/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

Editorial Reviews

One of the most original and inventive writers of his generation.” —Omar Robert Hamilton

“The Dissenters is an encyclopedia of all the ways bodies are imprisoned or made free—by politics, sex, power, love, death. An Egypt of the senses, mind and heart, laid open and dissected in every manner. This book will seduce you from its opening pages and stun you with its last. A tremendous, confident novel from Youssef Rakha, assuming his rightful place on the literary stage.” —Bina Shah

“The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lifestyles set them on a collision course with Egypt's military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath.”—Amitav Ghosh

“Here is Egypt, Cairo, ‘Mother of the World,’ viewed through the chameleon lives of one Cairene mother, ‘a fractal of our country.’ With thrilling prose and a narrative that flows as relentless as the Nile, Youssef Rakha takes us on the big dipper of Egyptian history from Nasser to now. The Dissenters is by turns haunted, horrifying, and hilarious. At heart, though, it’s an elegy for lost revolutions, generations . . . but never really lost, not in that land of revenants. You'll end up knowing more about the real, perhaps hyper-real, Egypt than you will from many a history. Knowing, too, that love's more real still: more real than time.”—Tim Mackintosh-Smith

“History is bulldozed not metaphorically, but in real time and with real machines and with true ogres at the wheel. There is almost everything that we cannot save, and every day we are not just reminded of but actually see how we’ve been pulverized, reduced to specters. And yet, we go on witnessing. The Dissenters is the book of witnessing par excellence, telling not the story of just one woman or one Egypt, but rather of all of us who are of these geographies.”—Salar Abodh

From the Publisher