Powerhouse of Omani letters Bushra Khalfan was among the first women novelists to be published in Oman, and Dilshad, her second novel, has not only made her a household name in Muscat but brought her fame across the Arabic-speaking region. Now in its ninth edition, it won the Katara Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for the IPAF 2022.

Khalfan’s vibrant and gritty twentieth-century epic spans three generations of minority communities within the ethnic, linguistic and cultural melting pot that is Muscat. Bringing to life a place and time never before explored in literature, Khalfan is as popular for the politically conscious insights her meticulously researched historical fiction offers as for its rambunctious spirit. It is this balance between the quirky and the profound that makes her work so effective: multiple narrators voice a tale populated by characters swept along on the often tragic currents of wider events, ground down by the inequity of the wider system, yet always retaining their irreverent and idiosyncratic survival strategies.

Approximate number of pages: 494 p.

Foreign rights: contact the author‘s agent