Youssef Rakha’s The Dissenters is a bold, brutally honest novel worth your time

📚 Historical fiction is a well-fed genre — hundreds of thousands of titles are published annually. Egyptian historical fiction? Few and far between. As of late, however, Egypt has been getting its share of the genre, and Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha’s The Dissenters is the latest to land on our bookshelves. Deemed “transgressive,” the novel is surely that… and then some.

The plot: The novel is told from the perspective of Nour, a middle-aged Egyptian man grappling with the death of his mother, Amna — the matriarch who haunts the narrative. Following her death in 2015’s Cairo, Nour visits his family home’s attic, where he begins to dig out his family’s history, particularly the personal history of his mother, through a series of deep, hallucinatory, and immersive visions that seemingly take the narrator back in time to serve as a firsthand witness to her life.

The Dissenters, reminiscent of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is largely written in the second person, in the form of letters addressed to Nour’s own sister, long estranged from her mother following a fallout. As Nour begins penning his mother’s history and his own hallucinations to his sister, the reader is taken back to various points in Amna’s life, each reflective of an epoch in Egypt’s modern history that would see the country irrevocably changed.

What we liked: Through Amna’s personal history, the book intelligently highlights and explores with nuance the evolution of Egypt in the 20th century. The mother’s own trajectory in life — piousness, rebelliousness, activism, independence, in no particular order — mirrors the social changes rippling through the country, woven dexterously into the evolving socio-political context. The writing is immersive, anything but straightforward, and at times incredibly confusing — a stroke of genius, in our opinion, when it comes to portraying Nour’s own internal turmoil.

Split into several chunky chapters — but constrained within a manageable 320 pages — The Dissenters does not play it safe. The book does not shy away from “taboo” topics, and the author writes with unapologetic and bold honesty. Aside from the engrossing subject matter, we thoroughly enjoyed the nostalgic and studied depictions of Egyptian people, places, and politics. There are times when the reader may not necessarily agree with what is being conveyed, but the emotional weight of it all is never compromised.

The verdict: At its core, this is a novel that feels quintessentially Egyptian. Rakha’s pen cuts, and there are times when this epistolary novel proves impossible to put down. Both a deeply personal work exploring familial ties and faults and a broader commentary on Om el Donia throughout history, The Dissenters manages to accomplish something well worth the read.

WHERE TO GET IT- You can find the paperback version at Diwan. Get the e-book on Amazon.