Ezzat El Kamwari’s ‘absorbing and kaleidoscopic retelling of Egyptian history.’

In his review for Times Literary Supplement, Alev Adil has praised Ezzat El Kamwari’s House of the Wolf as ‘a haunting glimpse into complex, tangled lives silenced by official histories.’

Set in al-Ish, a fictional village near Zagazig in the Nile Delta, House of the Wolf follows the fortunes of the al-Deeb clan over four generations from Ottoman rule to the US invasion of Iraq.

Adil’s review goes on to compliment Kamwari’s technique and sense of history:

Desire is at the heart of this story, yet House of the Wolf is not, by any stretch a conventionally romantic novel… El Kamhawi’s prose is lean, understated and often poetic, and his writing owes as much to oral storytelling as to the traditions of the novel. His mode of address is often mythic, sometimes magical.

First published in Lebanon just before the revolution in Egypt in 2011, House of the Wolf was translated in 2012 by Nancy Roberts, and went on to win the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2012.

From the start of 2014, I.B.Tauris has been handling distribution for the American University of Cairo Press, the largest translator of Arabic literature in the world. To discover more cutting edge translated novels from Egypt and across the Middle East, visit www.ibtauris.com/arabicfiction.

Further details about House of the Wolf can be found on our website.