Ghorba Ghost Story

Building 46 draws its reader into the darkest, quietest spaces of China's vast capital. Set just before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this queer coming-out-and-of-age story explores the interplay between so-called Eastern and Western superpowers, between humans and halls of power, and between light and dark. It is a love letter to Beijing. It is an expression of love for its intellectuals, its imams, its waitresses, its foreigners, its wanderers, its middle-aged moms, its shadow men, its DVD bootleggers, its migrant labourers. It is a love letter to a people very different to their mono-dimensional portrayals in foreign correspondence. From the author of the award-winning and critically acclaimed nonfiction book When We Were Arabs comes a stunning, poetic fiction debut that aims to decentralise and destabilise the status quos of the anglophone book industry, to make room for a new and a fresh cannon of enthralling, delightful, and consciously political writing for an emerging and indignant generation of readers.

In this dazzling finale - both of the Ghorba Ghost Story Series and award-winning author Massoud Hayoun's brief career as a novelist - Darf Publishers brings you a Jewish Egyptian Wizard of Oz, radiating "crushed velour and luxury" and "sensuality, once more". Sam Saadoun, not to be confused with the gay Jewish Arab protagonist of Building 46 of the same name, had planned to spend a final night in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn with the last of many lovers. But amid their frolicking through that American immigrant enclave's Post-Soviet attractions, Sam finds himself cast back to the heart of the matter: Alexandria, Egypt in the 1930s. With the biting satire and folly of a Luis Bunuel film and the delicious melancholy of a Beach House ballad, Hayoun offers us a striking last look at the Ghorba Ghost World's longing, love, and lust as well as the political intimacies that have shaped the 21st Century Arab world and North African diaspora. This is a parting glance that is bound to haunt and delight.