Author of
An Unlasting Home (Mariner Books US, 2022; Saqi Books UK, 2023)
The Hidden Light of Objects (Bloomsbury-Qatar Foundation 2014; reissued by Saqi Books UK in 2025)
Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait and spent the first six years of her life in London, Edinburgh and St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a PhD in English literature from Brown University and for twenty years taught English and comparative literature at Kuwait University as an associate professor. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, The First Line, After the Pause, Rowayat, The Markaz Review, and various anthologies. Her occasional essays have appeared in, among others, World Literature Today, The Blog of the LA Review of Books, and on the BBC World Service. Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2014. She lives and writes in Kuwait.
Mai Al-Nakib
Books by Mai
An Unlasting Home (Mariner Books US, 2022; Saqi Books UK, 2023)
The debut novel from an award-winning short story writer: a multigenerational saga spanning Lebanon, Iraq, India, the United States, and Kuwait that brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women.
In 2013, Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she always thought she would leave, and a country she recognizes less and less, and yet a certain inertia keeps her there. But when teaching Nietzsche in her Intro to Philosophy course leads to an accusation of blasphemy, which carries with it the threat of execution, Sara realizes she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all. Interspersed with Sara’s narrative are the stories of her grandmothers: beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in the old city of Kuwait and swept off her feet to an estate in India by the son of a successful merchant family; and her two mothers: Noura, who dreams of building a life in America and helping to shape its Mid-East policies, and Maria, who leaves her own children behind in Pune to raise Sara and her brother Karim and, in so doing, transforms many lives.
Ranging from the 1920s to the near present, An Unlasting Home traces Kuwait’s rise from a pearl-diving backwater to its reign as a thriving cosmopolitan city to the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable epic and a spellbinding family saga.
PRAISE
“This smooth, fast-flowing narrative stands as a testament to the eternal vibrancy and pluck of women in the Arab world.”—The Financial Times
“So fresh and unsettling that it will enchant you from the first page and linger for days after reading. . . . Deftly written.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“An ambitious family epic with a historical sweep, an elegy to grandmothers and mothers who were forced from their original homes by personal or political circumstances in the Middle East to build nests elsewhere.”—World Literature Today
“Grapples profoundly with the limits of individual choice and the hold exerted by a person’s homeland. . . . Accomplished and searing.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Stories-within-stories is a classic Middle Eastern format with roots much deeper than The Arabian Nights. [An Unlasting Home] marries these traditions and implodes them.”—Guernica, Eman Quotah
“Refreshing and eye-opening.”—Electric Literature, Amy Omar
“A mesmerising and poignant saga. . . . A spellbinding book, offering a deep and insightful perspective on the complicated lives of each character. This thought provoking and intense drama is poetrically written and really evokes a sense of place. . . . It’s a crafted skill to be able to bring a story to life with such compassion.”—Buzz Magazine
“Mai Al-Nakib lyrically explores themes of homeland, tradition and agency as she relates the stories of generations of Arab women across Kuwait, the US, Iraq, India and Lebanon.”—Ms. Magazine
“A sweeping novel that will stick with readers for a long time.”—Debutiful
“Passionate and skilful. Every detail lands perfecty and leaves the reader altered.”—A.L. Kennedy, author of We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time
“Mai Al-Nakib dares to question the traditions and rituals of her society. This excellent novel gripped and distrubed me.—Hanan Al-Shaykh, author of Beirut Blues
“An exquisite and necessary novel on the nature of freedom.”—Ira Mathur, author of Love the Dark Days
“A poignant and profound novel. . .Mai Al-Nakib writes with grace and intelligence.”—Selma Dabbagh, author of Out of It
“Deeply enchanting, at times suspenseful, and always engaging, An Unlasting Home is filled with tales of women’s lives and their intersection with the often volatile and unpredictable currents of nations, war, and political history. Mai Al-Nakib’s storyteller’s voice is fresh and original—her book grabbed me from the outset and kept me entranced to the last page.”—Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Fencing with the King
“An Unlasting Home is an unforgettable story of people making choices for love, family, freedom, and identity against the tidal forces of history in the Arab region. Shimmering with poetic prose and as pressingly real as the white heat of August in Baghdad, this poignant debut will keep you in its thrall.”—Juhea Kim, author of Beasts of a Little Land
“A spellbinding family history unfolds as a Kuwaiti woman goes on trial for blasphemy in a world gone mad. Deftly written, structurally brilliant, Mai Al-Nakib’s An Unlasting Home is a lasting novel that splits open time, leaps across continents, and creates the sort of characters we carry forward into our hearts and lives. I absolutely loved this book.”—A. Manette Ansay, author of Blue Water
The Hidden Light of Objects (Bloomsbury-Qatar Foundation 2014; reissued by Saqi Books UK in 2025)
Winner of the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2014 First Book Award
A young girl, renamed Amerika in honor of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country’s growing hostility toward the West. A self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two classmates. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. A Kuwaiti woman returns to her family after being held captive in Iraq for a decade. The headlines tell of war, unrest, and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you may see another side of life in the Middle East—adolescent love, yearnings for independence, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib’s luminous stories capture overlooked moments in the lives of those who live in this fraught region of the world—and the power of ordinary objects to hold extraordinary memories.
PRAISE
“Al-Nakib writes with penetrating insight and such compressed lyricism that at times her prose seems to border on poetry.”—Sydney Morning Herald, Pick of the Week, Cameron Woodhead
“The Hidden Light of Objects marks the emergence of an author already confident in her craft and ability to give voice to the emotions and yearnings of her characters.”—New Internationalist
“This is hardly the collection of a shy novice, and Al-Nakib revels in the challenge of mixing myth with reality.”—The Independent
“Al-Nakib has a metaphoric voice that straddles the disillusionment of adulthood, the desperate longing of teenagers and the cheerful naivety of childhood. It’s a cohesive voice that binds a collection of diverse stories that segue between moods of melancholia and nostalgia, optimism and lust with the ease of honey gently drizzled over warm almond cake.”—Mslexia
“Mai Al-Nakib’s The Hidden Light of Objects—a debut collection of stories strung together by the common thread of longing, sometimes for the past, sometimes for peace but mostly for the preservation of memory in all its vivid freshness.—Shelf Awareness, Starred Review
“Al-Nakib’s writing is both disciplined and daring. The material of her stories is strange and compellingly familiar. A novel is promised next from an author who took her time to make such a significant mark with this first collection.”—Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Pierce
“These powerful stories evoke a deep reconsideration of what the reader ‘knows’ about the ‘Middle East.’ For that reason alone, they deserve to be widely read.”—Review of Middle East Studies, Mary-Ann Tétreault
“The Hidden Light of Objects is shaped like the best of American or British short stories. The collection is more easily accessible for a Western reader than most translations; the bridge the reader crosses is not very far.”—Asian Review of Books, Marcia Lynx Qualey
“With her compassion for an old, vanished world and her exceptional eye for the bruised landscape of the modern Middle East, Al-Nakib should be heralded as an exciting new literary voice.”—The National
“Throughout, Al-Nakib’s language of loss is unsentimental yet striking and lush. The author—whose mother tongue is English—evokes the land and its inhabitants with unusual juxtapositions, proximities, and linguistic contrasts.”—Numéro Cinq
“The old world and the new. The strife in the Gulf, once peaceful and reflective. East and West, Arabic and English, the poetry of the heart, the eye of the hawk; all these elements produce the lustrous pearls of Mai Al-Nakib’s short stories.”—Hanan al-Shaykh, author of Beirut Blues
“Through a richly nuanced and generous lens, Al-Nakib’s gracefully intertwined stories celebrate the living desire that connects us to home—wherever in the world that might be—as well as to the past and to each other. The most original first collection of short fiction I have read in years. A powerful voice already in full mastery of her powers.”—A. Manette Ansay, author of Vinegar Hill
“The Hidden Light of Objects brings forth both the light and the shadows of the contemporary Middle East in clean-edged prose that startles us, not with sudden violence or polemic, but with the ineluctable force of human desire. Kuwait itself becomes a character, full of contradictions, in this multifaceted set of stories and vignettes. Superb.”—Lucy Ferriss, author of The Lost Daughter
“These moments examined, small and beautiful and finely drawn, evoke a world of loss, of longing, and remembrance. Mai Al-Nakib’s debut collection reveals the life before and after, old and new, innocent and wise, becoming. Beautiful.”—M. Evelina Galang, author of Angel de la Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery
“Imagine a pop-up book that doesn’t need paper cut-outs to perform its magic, and there you have Mai Al-Nakib’s enchanting first collection of stories. Readers would not be mistaken to think that Al-Nakib is a distant cousin of W.G. Sebald, George Saunders, and Barry Yourgrau. These stories are neatly-wrapped presents. Open them slowly and savor the beauty and fragility of life being lived.”—Elliott Colla, author of Baghdad Central