An Unlasting Home

Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she recognises less and less. Yet since her return from the States eleven years earlier, a certain inertia has kept her there. When she is accused of blasphemy, which carries with it the threat of execution, Sara realises she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all. Awaiting trial, Sara retraces the past, intent on examining the lives of the women who made her. She conjures forth her grandmothers - beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in Kuwait and later swept off to India by her wealthy merchant husband. An Unlasting Home brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable family portrait and a spellbinding epic tale.



Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait and spent the first six years of her life in the UK. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University, with a special emphasis on gender, cosmopolitanism and postcolonial issues. Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, won the Edinburgh International Book Festival's First Book Award in 2014. Her stories and essays have been widely published, and she is a frequent contributor to World Literature Today, LA Review of Books and the BBC World Service. She lives in Kuwait and is working on her second novel.



'A smooth, fast-flowing narrative […] a testament to the eternal vibrancy of women in the Arab world.'