Slave Yards

Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist. She is the author of several short story collections, plays, and three novels including The Horses' Hair and Orange Content. She was chosen as one of the thirty-nine best Arab authors under the age of forty by the Beirut39 project of the Hay Festival.Nancy Roberts is a free-lance Arabic-to-English translator. Her literary translations include Salwa Bakr's The Man From Bashmour, Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Gaza Weddings and Time of White Horses, for which she was awarded the 2018 Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and International Understanding.

A challenging, powerful story of people trying to survive through some of life's harshest conditions. It captures a time and place with nuance and care. Explores questions of race, class, and freedom. This is a novel that showcases lives of extreme poverty and lavish wealth, and explores the ways in which its setting—Libya in the nineteenth century—was a particularly fraught time for women. An amazingly rich and fascinating novel. The translation is excellent: simple, accessible, and graceful. This beautifully written novel is a milestone because an Arab woman writer dared to investigate, describe, and expose two slaveries: that of slaves and that of women. The Slave Yards penetrates the soul and lives deep down in the heart. A richly-layered story with several subplots--each interesting in its own right.