The Hidden Light of Objects

A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country’s growing hostility towards the West. A self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two belligerent classmates. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. A Kuwaiti woman returns to her family after being held captive in Iraq for a decade.

The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived - adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib’s luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people - and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.

Mai Al-Nakib is the author of An Unlasting Home (Saqi Books, 2023). Her short stories have appeared in publications including ’Ninth Letter’, ’The First Line’, ’After the Pause’ and World Literature Today. The Hidden Light of Objects won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2014. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and teaches English and comparative literature at Kuwait University.