Talking Location With … author Tom Benjamin: BOLOGNA and environs
Suslov’s Daughter
Location(s): Aden, Paris
Genre(s): Fiction
Era(s): early 21st century
As a young man growing up under communism in South Yemen, Imran finds himself drawn to Hawiya, the daughter of a high-ranking official in the ruling Marxist party. He departs Aden, the seaport city of his childhood, to study literature in Paris, hoping to ‘see the sunset of capitalism with his own eyes.’ Years later he returns to Yemen and meets Hawiya again – only to find that she is now a niqab-wearing Salafist, calling on people to join the conservative Islamist movement. The novel spans the 1960s to the early 21st century, from the independence of southern Yemen and the subsequent establishment of The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, to the Unification of Yemen in 1990 and the Arab Spring. Set against the backdrop of Yemeni history, Habib Abdulrab Sarori’s Arabic Booker long-listed novel traces one man’s lifelong search for love and his own political ideology
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