A closer look at the battles within in Maan Abu Taleb’s debut novel All The Battles.

📚 Jordanian writer Maan Abu Taleb uses the boxing ring as a metaphor for a divided city and for existence itself in his debut novel All The Battles — delivering a story about far more than boxing. It’s a sharp reading of identity, social privilege, the existential fractures of contemporary life, and a rare break from the elegies and didactic politics of much contemporary Arabic fiction.

The plot: Saed Habjouqa is a man in his 30s of Circassian descent living in Amman. On the surface, he has everything his social class is supposed to want — a stable life, a promising career, a comfortable climb up the professional ladder. Then he discovers boxing. What starts as a passing curiosity deepens into genuine passion, pulling him toward a modest club in one of the city’s eastern neighborhoods and into a world entirely unlike the one he has always known. He ends up torn between two lives, two versions of himself — inside the ring and out.

What we liked: The novel’s greatest strength is its use of boxing as a lens for the human condition. Abu Taleb asks a question worth sitting with: what happens when you discover your real passion years into building a life that points the other way — do you have the courage to start again, or do you cling to the familiar out of fear? He offers no easy answers and wisely keeps his distance from the superhero archetype. His protagonist is an ordinary human being, full of fear, hesitation, and doubt.

Amman functions as a character in its own right. Abu Taleb draws on the well-known social and geographic divide between east and west Amman — not as a political thesis, but as lived experience. Between the bourgeois neighborhoods where Saed navigates his advertising career and the packed training halls across town, he sketches a precise portrait of the class differences that shape people, define their futures, and set the ceiling on their expectations. Direct, unpretentious prose — no literary performance, no labored description — lets the colloquial terms do their work.

Our verdict: The ending stumbles, but the novel remains a distinctive piece of work. Its real power lies in its distance from victory or defeat in any conventional sense: All The Battles is about the quieter fights every person wages with themselves, and that’s precisely why it lands even for readers who have never laced up a pair of boxing gloves.

WHERE TO FIND IT- You can find the book at the AUC bookstore and Diwan.