Guapa by Saleem Haddad

RECOMMENDED
 
A Middle-Eastern capital caught in the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. A day in the life of a young man disillusioned with both East and West and struggling to find a place for himself in a society ruled by hypocrisy and contradictions. Rasa works as an interpreter for Western journalists by day and divides his nights between the Guapa, an underground nightclub where the city’s clandestine LGBT community congregates, and his secret lover Taymour. Every night Taymour sneaks into the house Rasa shares with his overbearing grandmother, the woman who raised him. When she finds them in bed together on the eve of Taymour’s wedding day, all hell breaks loose...
 
Wry and aching, irresistibly funny at times, Guapa heralds the arrival of a strong new voice from the Arabic world.
 
 Winner of the Polari First Book Prize 2017
 
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“Freewheeling and incendiary.”
—London Review of Books
 
“Guapa offers an intimate, complex portrait of gay life in the Arab world, a subject rarely explored in fiction.”
—Gay Times
 
“This immensely readable novel is fluent, passionate and emotionally honest. Equally astute in its analysis of Arab and American mores, the book’s characters are nuanced and dynamic; it gives fresh life to the maxim 'the personal is political'.”
—The Guardian
 
“…vibrant, wrenching début novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood.”
—The New Yorker