al-Ṭilyānī

Winner of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, al-Ṭilyānī ("The Italian") is the acclaimed debut novel of Tunisian critic and academic Shukri Mabkhout. It opens with a startling image: at his father's funeral, a young man known as "the Italian" — nicknamed for his striking good looks — launches a violent, inexplicable assault on the neighborhood imam. From that scandal, the narrator sets out to reconstruct the life of his friend Abdel Nasser and understand what could have driven him to it.

The story that emerges is both intensely personal and sweepingly political. As a charismatic leftist student and journalist at the University of Tunis, Abdel Nasser comes of age in the twilight of Habib Bourguiba's rule and the rise of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, caught in the bitter struggle between the secular Left and the Islamist movement. At its heart is his tormented love affair with Zeina, a brilliant philosophy student, whose dreams — like his own — are ground down by a corrupt, patriarchal society.

Vivid, unflinching, and deeply rooted in a pivotal moment of modern Tunisian history, al-Ṭilyānī is a portrait of a generation whose hopes for change collided with power, disillusionment, and compromise.