Rabih Alameddine follows his international bestseller The Hakawati with an enchanting story of the life of a book-loving, obsessive, seventy-two-year-old, blue-haired 'unnecessary woman', living in Beirut. This is a novel to savour.
A US NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2014 FINALIST
[Display excerpt in same handwritten font as cover title?]
[Excerpt opens] I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time . . . If literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass - an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature give me life, and life kills me.
Well, life kills everyone. [Excerpt ends]
'Beautiful and absorbing.' New York Times
'Exquisite . . . This one's a keeper.' Independent
An Unnecessary Woman dramatizes a wonderful mind at play. The mind belongs to the protagonist, and it is filled with intelligence, sharpness and strange memories and regrets. But, as in the work of Calvino and Borges, the mind is also that of the writer, the arch-creator. His tone is ironic and knowing; he is fascinated by the relationship between life and books. He is a great phrase-maker and a brilliant writer of sentences. And over all this fiercely original act of creation is the sky of Beirut throwing down a light which is both comic and tragic, alert to its own history and to its mythology, guarding over human frailty and the idea of the written word with love and wit and understanding and a rare sort of wisdom
