al-Khulkhāl

Al-Khulkhāl ("The Anklet") is a Tunisian historical novel by Ḥasanayn Bin ʻAmmū, set in the world of the Beys, tribal encampments, and court intrigue of Ottoman-era Tunisia. A stolen anklet sets its heroine on a long ordeal: torn from her home in Le Kef, she is swept among the Bedouin tribes, brought to the capital of Tunis, and finally banished by the Bey to exile on the island of Kerkennah — delivered from her fate only by the very man who set her tragedy in motion.

Part of Bin ʻAmmū's project of the Tunisian historical novel, the book uses one woman's misfortune to dramatize a whole society: the power of the Beylik, the friction between central authority and the tribes of the interior, and the precariousness of an individual life caught between them.

Written in Arabic, it belongs to a body of work in which the author revisits pivotal eras of Tunisian history — the Hafsid and Ottoman periods and the edges of the colonial era — through richly researched storytelling.