A Shimmering Red Fish Swims With Me

A powerful and poetic masterpiece where ordinary people’s dreams play out in a city plagued by government exploitation and crime Shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation As his wife delivers their child in the next room, a man wakes from the nightmare of a teenage girl’s body lying beneath his bed. In this twilight before birth, Fadel’s epic novel catches us in the confusion between exaltation and despair. The girl, Farah, once dreamed of being a singer in Casablanca, a city standing in the shadow of the tallest minaret in the world. Illuminating the aspirations of those just struggling to make a living, A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me is a tour-de-force, a novel of power plays and petty jealousies, deceit and corruption, love and loss, written with Fadel’s masterful, narrative control and searing, historical insight.

With an infectious blend of humor, satire, and biting social commentary, Yassin Adnan gives readers a portrait of contemporary Morocco—and the city of Marrakech—told through the eyes of the hapless Rahhal Laâouina, a.k.a. the Squirrel. Painfully shy, not that bright, and not all that popular, Rahhal somehow imagines himself a hero. With a useless degree in ancient Arabic poetry, he finds his calling in the online world, where he discovers email, YouTube, Facebook, and the news site Hot Maroc. Enamored of the internet and the thrill of anonymity it allows, Rahhal opens the Atlas Cubs Cyber Café, where patrons mingle virtually with politicians, journalists, hackers, and trolls. However, Rahhal soon finds himself mired in the dark side of the online world—one of corruption, scandal, and deception. Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017, Hot Maroc is a vital portrait of the challenges Moroccans, young and old, face today. Where press freedoms are tightly controlled by government authorities, where the police spy on, intimidate, and detain citizens with impunity, and where adherence to traditional cultural icons both anchors and stifles creative production, the online world provides an alternative for the young and voiceless. In this revolutionary novel that recalls Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Dave Eggers’s The Circle, Adnan fixes his lens on young Rahhal and his contemporaries as they navigate the perilous and changing landscape of the real and virtual worlds they inhabit.

An unforgettable and eviscerating novel of human frailty, brutality, and resistance as told through the first-person prison narratives of a man and a woman History of Ash is a fictional prison account narrated by Mouline and Leila, who have been imprisoned for their political activities during the so-called Lead Years of the 1970s and 1980s in Morocco, a period that was characterized by heavy state repression. Moving between past and present, between experiences lived inside the prison cell and outside it, in the torture chamber and the judicial system, and the challenges they faced upon their release, Mouline and Leila describe their strategies for survival and resistance in lucid, often searing detail, and reassess their political engagements and the movements in which they are involved. Written with compassion and insight, History of Ash speaks to human brutality, resilience, and the power of the human spirit. It succeeds in both documenting the prison experience and humanizing it, while ultimately holding out the promise of redemption through a new generation.

Bestselling author Michele Bardsley cooks up stories about hearth and home, love and loss, truth and hope in her anthology: A Mother Scorned and Other Stories. The collection includes the dark suspense story, A Mother Scorned, which won the Grand Prize in the 72nd Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition as well as the EPPIE-winning novella, Midnight Intentions. Go on ... take a bite of gourmet fiction!

Almond's past haunts her in the darkest way and she cannot face the truth. It gets worse as reality seems to slip away into a world she cannot make any sense of. She struggles accepting her new reality as it gets harder to tell the difference from what is real or not. Despite it all Almond fights to save the creatures who have crossed her path in a world that once only existed in her mother's bedtime stories. After many dangerous encounters with deceitful creatures, Almond finds herself in a mental health facility with unethical stories of monsters, walking and talking animals, mountains with faces and rippling skies. Almond must trust in herself. She must do the unimaginable to get to the truth or find her sanity.

It's spring 1990 in a dingy small-town Moroccan bar. Zina is serving drinks when a mysterious man approaches her. The man gives Zina a handwritten note from her husband, Aziz, who disappeared the day after their wedding, eighteen years ago, after participating in the failed 1972 coup against King Hassan II. Zina has spent the past eighteen years searching for Aziz, who has been imprisoned in inhuman conditions in a solitary cell inside a secret desert jail. Will Zina finally find Aziz? Moving back and forth between 1990 and the past, A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me recounts the painful circumstances that brought Zina and Aziz together and the torture after the 1972 coup that tore them apart.

The most beautiful fish in the entire ocean discovers the real value of personal beauty and friendship.