Mr Noon by: Huda Barakat (Beirut: Dar Al-Adab), 2019, 255pp.

Renowned Lebanese novelist Huda Barakat released her seventh novel entitled Mr Noon from Dar Al-Adab in Beirut last month.

Barakat is the winner of the 2019 Arabic Booker Prize for her novel (Night Mail).

The new novel takes place in Beirut and is about Mr Noon's struggle in the city and the pain he has to endure: his mother's cruelty, his brother's bullying and his girlfriend Nada who abandoned him.

Barakat is a Lebanese novelist who was born in Beirut in 1952. She has worked in teaching and journalism and currently lives in France. Barakat has published six novels, two plays, a book of short stories and a book of memoirs.

She received the ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ in 2002 and the ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite National’ in 2008. Her novels include: The Stone of Laughter (1990), Disciples of Passion (1993), The Tiller of Waters (2000), which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature that year, and My Master and my Lover (2004).

Her fifth novel, The Kingdom of This Earth (2012), reached the IPAF long list in 2013. In 2015, she was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, given (at that time) every two years to honour a writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.

Barakat was featured in Banipal magazine on several occasions, including the publication of excerpts from A Tiller of Water in autumn 2009.