This Women in Translation month, I’m featuring a collection of short stories by the Lebanese writer and critic Lana Abdelrahman. I had the pleasure of meeting and sharing a stage with Abdelrahman at the Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival in Assam, India, earlier this year. When we said goodbye, she generously pressed a copy of her short story collection A Spell of Longing, translated by Gretchen McCullough, Mohamed Metwalli and Karmen Hanna, into my hands.
Published by Egyptian press Azha Books, this wide-ranging collection features characters experiencing alienation or psychological rupture, often in mundane settings. A young woman walks down the street and encounters her dead uncle; a girl’s consciousness floats in her bedroom unable to communicate with her bereaved parents; a tailor becomes fixated on an old man who keeps bringing a woman’s clothes for repair; a corrupt businessman conducts a one-sided interview with the reader in which he explains why he is the obvious choice to be the next big political leader.
Cognitive dissonance abounds, twisted together with a strong strand of surrealism. The characters are often uneasy and so are we as readers, never able to be certain of the rules of the worlds through which we move. Occasionally, hints of profound trauma bubble to the surface – passing references to the war that devastated (and continues to devastate) Lebanon, mentions of abrupt deaths and losses. The fact that these are largely kept on the edge of the field of vision makes for a very powerful and unsettling reader experience – we feel what it is to try to live in a world that looks safe but may shatter at any moment.
As a writer who loves playing with distorted perspectives and self-doubt in my fiction, I particularly enjoyed the more interior stories, in which characters sit with their impressions and question themselves. ‘Five Faces of Hayat’s World’ was a standout for me – a collection of fragments written around the protagonist’s fiftieth birthday as she struggles to ‘continue the living required of her’. Among many fine moments, it contains one of the best descriptions of wanting and failing to complete a piece of writing I’ve ever read:
‘In her drawers were many papers, fragments of stories that remained incomplete because they stayed hostage to a tomorrow that never came. She continued writing without completing what she wrote, and this is what tortured her more – the existence of suspended things that needed a rising she was incapable of.’
Female agency is also a strong thread. Many of the stories feature women finding ways to free or at least assert themselves in the face of (often male) treachery, inadequacy or entitlement. A housemaid expresses her desire to go swimming on her one precious day off; the dead uncle’s niece decides to break off her engagement; a problem neighbour prompts a woman to resolve to go ‘in search of the truth of what’s happening’.
Scheherazade, the legendary storyteller in one of the Arab world’s most famous texts, who saves herself by narrating tales so gripping that the tyrant intent on killing her keeps her alive night after night, seems to linger in the margins. Indeed, A Thousand and One Nights is mentioned on the first page of the opening story. Abdelrahman is building on a literary tradition in which female ingenuity and agency has long been celebrated – a sharp contrast to the relatively passive princesses being rescued by handsome princes that form the stock characters of many Western fairy tales and classics.
Indeed, the stories in A Spell of Longing are not written or published in tune with Western sensibilities (although, as is so often the case with literature from the Global South, the references are extremely diverse, making the framework of most anglophone writers look parochial by comparison – Edith Piaf, Hercules and Samson all feature in these pages). As a result, pacing and exposition sometimes work rather differently to the mechanisms readers of mainstream British fiction will be used to. Endings can feel abrupt or sometimes seem to deflate what has gone before. Similarly, the layout – with, for example, opening paragraphs indented as epigraphs would be in British texts and hyphens used as dashes – will challenge those habituated to mainstream anglophone publishing norms.
But for me, this is precisely the joy of reading A Spell of Longing. This is not a book aimed at or curated for a reader like me. Indeed, it is a book that I would be unlikely to encounter in the UK at all. As such, when I read it, I am a guest in someone else’s space, given the opportunity to see how things are done elsewhere, without any attempt to mediate or dilute them for my perceived taste. This can be challenging, particularly if you are used to being centred in the books you read, but it is also a great privilege: a welcome disruption to the habits that surround us and a reminder that customs that can often seem mandatory are just choices. Like many of Abdelrahman’s protagonists I arrived at the end resolved to keep walking my own path.
A Spell of Longing by Lana Abdelrahman, translated from the Arabic by Gretchen McCullough, Mohamed Metwalli and Karmen Hanna (Azha Books, 2026)