**Winner of the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
**
Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental
novel about love as a weapon of empire.
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a
man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a
photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and
addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic
daughter of immigrants "returning" to a country she's never been to
before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with
balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon
their desire--for one another, for the selves they want to become
through the other--takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics,
especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating
perspectives, Noor Naga's experimental debut examines the ethics of
fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa.
In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces
(and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone
survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to
tell about it?
