Winner
of the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Shortlisted
for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted
for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Winner
of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental
novel about love as a weapon of empire.
In
the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a
man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was
a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed
and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a
nostalgic daughter of immigrants "returning" to a country
she's never been to before, teaching English and living in a
light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and
he moves in. But soon their desire--for one another, for the selves
they want to become through the other--takes a violent turn that
neither of them expected.
A
dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics,
especially when exported overseas, If
an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in
alternating perspectives, Noor Naga's experimental debut examines the
ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved—and
vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are
the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how
long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more
crucially, who gets to tell about it?
