Five Books That Show What Life Is Really Like In the Middle East

Too often, stories of the Middle East manifest as sweeping, catch-all descriptions. In embracing generalization, they subsume the experiences of individual cities, neighborhoods, and families. As readers, we lose something irreplaceable when we are denied the chance to experience the distinctness of this region.

The beauty in Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan lives in the small. It lives in the warbled cries of a street vendor hawking fried snacks. It lives in the shine of a bride’s jewelry, the echoes of the iftar Azan every night during Ramadan. Through these tiny details, entire countries come alive on the page.

In our book Defiant Dreams, we embrace these small moments. Defiant Dreams is a chronicle of Sola’s escape through education from Kandahar, Afghanistan, to Boston, Massachusetts. It begins with her childhood, set against sputtering rickshaws, roadside bombings, and seas of indigo burqas. It ends in America, amongst brick-lined campuses and pristine quantum physics labs.

The books listed below shine a light on simple intimacies, brilliant settings, and everyday conversations. They color for the reader what life is like in the Middle East, both in days present and days past. They are books that have shaped both of us personally, informed our writing, and brought us closer together.

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Hisham Matar, The Return

Matar’s book gripped us immediately with a sense of deep sorrow. Matar writes with grace and eloquence about the losses he endured, the wounds he carries, and the longing he feels. “My father is both dead and alive,” he writes of his father, Libyan dissident Jaballa Matar. “I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future.”

Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy

Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz brilliantly interweaves the political and the personal. Generations of his characters navigate family life amidst the political shifts occurring outside their doors. Mahfouz’s writing pushes the reader towards a confrontation with their own life, and sparks reflections on how history shapes our personal stories.

Shahad Al Rawi, The Baghdad Clock

In The Baghdad Clock, Rawi reveals the suffering and the courage of a people trapped in a history they did not make. We were especially drawn to the friendship between the narrator and her friend Nadia. In the book’s opening pages, the two girls hide from air rides together in their basement. The scene bears a striking resemblance to several stories in Defiant Dreams, when Sola’s family was forced to shelter in their basement while rockets rained down on their home.

Fa​​tima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us

Reading A Place for Us was personal to both Sola and Malaina. Malaina grew up with a hyphenated identity—she is Indian-American—and related to the push and pull that many of Mirza’s characters experience as they navigate who they are and where they came from. Sola felt parts of her own life reflected in Mirza’s descriptions of the beauty and dignity inherent in everyday many Muslim traditions. A Place for Us is a beautiful read.

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Snow explores the tensions between East and West, the religious and secular, and the memories of the past and the realities of the present. Reading Snow, Sola felt a connection to her own country, Afghanistan, where similar tensions and contradictions have shaped their history and destiny. She recognized scenes that could have happened there: the assassination of a university director in a cafe, the power outage that plunges the city into darkness, and the uneasy coexistence of the liberal and the fundamentalist.

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Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education by Sola Mahfouz and Malaina Kapoor is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.