نازلة دار الأكابر

A single letter, buried for decades, holds the secret to a scandal that once shook one of Tunis's great families. When a young woman begins to search for the truth about her lineage, she unspools a story that reaches back to the years between the two World Wars, when tradition and reform collided in a changing Tunisia.

At the heart of that story stands the real-life reformer Tahar Haddad, champion of women's rights and author of the controversial Our Woman in Sharia and Society, and the forbidden bond imagined between him and Lella Zbaida, a woman of the aristocratic Rassaa household. Across generations and through many voices, the novel weaves private passion together with public history, class and servitude, enlightenment and obscurantism.

Amira Ghenim's acclaimed novel, shortlisted for the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is a rich, polyphonic family saga in which women become the keepers of memory and the true historians of a nation. It is a landmark of contemporary Tunisian literature about love, honor, and the weight of the past.