Al-Farawdeh..

In her debut novel, Dina El Hamamy takes us to confront a mysterious curse that has afflicted a village in Upper Egypt. With the disappearance of Enaya''s father and fiancé on the eve of her wedding, no weddings have taken place in the town for a decade and a half. The people of Farawda race to find a solution to help them complete their marriages, only to fall into the trap of charlatanry to no avail. The women of the village suffer double the suffering in a closed society, as if the difficult circumstances of their environment weren''t enough to prevent a curse from striking their simple dreams, such as marriage, to the ground. The novel devotes sufficient space for its characters to recall their histories and heritage, each discovering that the curse, while collective, carries an individual character. Behind this narrative device, the novel unravels the problems of troubled societies whose members shirk responsibility for the curses that befall them, attributing their defeats to the supernatural rather than confronting their shortcomings. The novelist created a complete world that resembles reality but does not touch it, in which she pours out her analyses of what each of us suffers, in a work she wove between the spacious and beautiful imagination and the narrow and painful reality, in the midst of this region where literature is sweet. Novelist Muhammad Ismail