STORY OF ZAHRA, THE - A NOVEL

Considered by many to be the Arab world's leading female novelist, Hanan al-Shaykh's reputation has just begun to blossom in this country. The publication last year of Women of Sand and Myrrh - her first novel to be published in the U.S. - was greeted with widespread excitement. Now comes the haunting and erotically charged The Story of Zahra, which, because of its courageous and frank treatment of personal, sexual, and political themes, remains, fourteen years after its original publication, banned in several Arab countries. This vividly imagined and gripping portrayal of a contemporary woman's life in war-torn Beirut is certain to considerably expand her readership here in the U.S. Zahra, a child of the Shia community in South Lebanon, is haunted by dark memories of deception and abuse by her parents. She flees her family and takes refuge with an uncle who is in political exile in West Africa. She finds no peace there however, and desperately enters into a loveless and doomed marriage. Dispirited and emotionally unstable, she returns to Beirut where civil war is raging. She enters a world in which explosions, shootings, and arbitrary death are commonplace. In a demented effort to stem the violence, she begins an affair with a sniper to divert him from his task. It is only then that she finds redemption, a strange fulfillment of her search for ecstasy, and a dream of how life could be, should the war ever end.