This year’s collection of standout books offers diverse narratives that explore identity, history, and personal transformation. 

1 Thouraia Al-Turki – Hayati kama eishtaha: zekrayat emra’ah saoudia min Oniza ilah California

(Thouria Al-Turki – My life the way I lived it: memoirs of a Saudi woman from Oniza to California)

Al-Karma, 2024

PP 244

This is perhaps one of the most topical books of the year. It is a relatively open-hearted account of the journey of a Saudi woman who grew up in the house of a conservative and well-off family on the more rigid side of the oil-rich kingdom and managed, partially due to her nature and partially due to the openness the family acquired through world travels that were made possible by financial ease, to break free from the restrictions that most Saudi women, including her own mother and sisters, had to put up with for a very long time before the most recent wave of modernization that is currently changing the narrative of the Saudi society.

In many ways, this memoir is a personal account, especially with its many details about family dynamics. However, given the nature of Thouria Al-Turki's journey, this 244-page memoir is also a close-up on the dynamics of power and modernization in Saudi Arabia and the status of Egypt, essentially as a cultural hub before the 1952 ouster of King Farouk by the Free Officers and during the Nasser and Sadat successive rules, in the hearts and minds of affluent Saudi families.

In a sense, it is also, even if so partially, a narrative of the social and economic changes in Egypt and Lebanon, the parallel cultural hub for affluent Saudi families.

Thouria Al-Turki is a professor of anthropology who has travelled the world, written and taught – mainly at the American University in Cairo. She shares her story with the readers with only a certain degree of openness and much reservation, possibly out of sensitivity towards her family that remained conservative at heart despite the signs of modernity.

2  Shahr fi Siena

(Translated under the same title from the original English: A month in Siena)

Hisham Matar

Al-Shorouk, 2024

PP 147

This is perhaps one of the most poetic and eloquent tales of pain to be written in pen-to-paper format, away from all direct recollections of loss and grief.

In less than 150 pages, Matar, a Libyan-British author whose father was eliminated for political opposition by the brutal dictator Muammar Qaddafi, walks, with or really without his reader, through museums, roads, and cemeteries of this northern Italian city, Siena, famous for its school of painting that flourished between the 13th and 15th centuries.

He takes his time to look at each of the paintings he came to see more than once – each time from a different angle and at a different hour of the day. What he sees, however, is inevitably a reformulated recollection of the injustice, sorrow and helplessness that he had gathered in "The Return", yet another poetic piece: a memoir of his first return to Libya in 2012, where he had to depart from a few decades earlier with his family to avoid the tyranny of Qaddafi who inevitably found, abducted and eliminated Matar's father in a way whose details were never really verified.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti's 'The Allegory of Good and Bad Government' reflects a profound debate about pursuing justice and dictators' atrocities inside Matar's mind.

The political messages of the Sienese paintings are dripped over Matar's voyage tale—both in the museum and in his thoughts and sentiments.

Equally dotting the text are the questions of death as an inevitable reality that shadows, or instead accompanies, one's life. Death, Matar writes, is strong enough that it can be an act of challenge, and this is precisely what he thought while looking at some of the paintings: that dictators prefer to imprison rather than kill their opponents.

Matar's 'month in Siena' is a story of happiness unravelling and grief surviving—or almost. It is the story of how engaging with art could be a liberating exercise, not in the sense of dispersing pain but rather soothing it.

3 Nos Masri, Nos Khawaga

Zakriat waWassafat min Tolian Masr

(Half Egyptian, half foreigner living in Egypt

Memoirs and Recipes of the Italians of Egypt)

Omar Ricardo Farid

Al-Karma, 2024

PP 350

The ultimate walk in the lanes of memory that took an Egyptian-Italian, who was born in the late 1970s in Egypt to an Egyptian father and an Italian mother, is pleasantly portrayed in this volume of tales and recipes that Omar Ricardo Farid Manicoso put on paper under the title of Nos Masri, Nos Khawga – Zekrayat waWassafat min Tolian Masr.

Written in light but composed, colloquial Egyptian Arabic in a separate set of recollections, this book takes the reader across cities, houses, families – and recipes, with the latter in particular securing the very firm imprint of memories.

Omar-Ricardo, as his Egyptian and Italian first names go, is not trying to tell his story so much as someone who was born in Egypt, where he lived his teens before travelling for university in the US and then settling down in Italy, where he started a family with a Turkish wife.

Omar-Ricardo is instead attempting to share thoughts on the essence of Mediterranean identity, namely, pleasant weather, good food, friendly people, and, at times, hot tempers. In so doing, the book moves from one story to the other and from one recipe to the other in line with how the book's table of contents is designed—just like a menu for a several-course Italian meal.

Every story, mostly from the Egyptian memory lane, is followed by a recipe from the heart of Italian cuisine, which Omar-Ricardo is very well versed in, not just by being born to an Italian mother.

Omar-Ricardo says that, like many other Italian men, rather than like the majority of Egyptian men, he loves to cook. After all, he says he is an engineer by profession and a cook by passion.

In 2020, Omar Ricardo joined a social media group where he shared reflections, stories, and recipes. He collected everything he wrote there and developed it into a book full of spirit.

The book has many stories about the remainder of a once eclectic environment that dominated several Cairo neighbourhoods, including Heliopolis, where he was born and raised. As offered in the book, the recollection of these years is about nostalgia "for the best days of one's life, " as Omar-Ricardo wrote. However, it is also about the depth of integration and differences, not just the surface of the often too-celebrated diversity. It is about this diversity's impact on art, culture and cuisine in Egypt.

The book is 'rich in flavour', with many stories about a poor imitation of a pizza in a supposedly Italian pizzeria in Heliopolis, confused coffee culture, and dining rituals.

Nos Masri, Nos Khawaga is an unpretentious tribute to Egypt's much-gloried cosmopolitanism in the first half of the 20th century.

4. Ahadith Al-Gawa fi Ektefa’ Athar Al-Qahera

(Recollections of sadness in the search for a Cairo unseen)

Hamed Mohamed Hamed

Al-Rawaq, 2024

PP 190

This book follows the vogue of fascination with Islamic history, which has dominated the past decade. Like others who contributed to the trend of walking the Cairo medieval history lane, Hamed Mohamed Hamed's Ahadith Al-Gawa fi Ektefa' Athar Al-Qahera is a walk in the allies of Cairo and its history as designated by its towering and impressive architecture—whether these buildings have survived the passing of centuries or not.

In essence, what Hamed is doing is not a touristic walk across Cairo cushioned with historical stories. It is rather a journey through the city's evolving political chapters. Built by the Fatimids in the 10th century, Cairo has gone through endless urban phases of evolution and deterioration.

By design, the book is meant to be revealing – both about historical accounts that never received much attention, if any, and untold stories about historical characters usually glorified in the main-stream story-telling of the country's medieval history.

The less than 200-page volume is packed with curious stories about palaces and palace intrigues. It also offers an off-the-mainstream take on Egyptian society's relations with Islam and its diverse sects and the impact of religion on politics.

Ahadith Al-Gawa fi Ektefa' Al-Qahera represents an example of the alternative take on the city's history that has recently become popular.