?What if the sky isolated you from the world? In his third novel, The Prayer of Anxiety (Salat Al Qalaq), acclaimed Egyptian author Mohamed Samir Nada presents a remarkable work of fiction that earned him the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2025.

Nada does not boast a literary background. He, however, managed to capture attention with a novel that doesn’t seek to please or entertain, but rather to pose difficult questions about power, fear, and religion, in complex Arabic that conveys a collective nightmare.

The plot: The novel takes place in a fictional Upper Egyptian village called Nag’e Al Manasi during the ‘70s. The story begins with a mysterious explosion in the sky, the cause of which is unknown. The explosion isolates the village from the world, to the extent that its inhabitants still believe that the war has been ongoing since 1967, and that the Israeli enemy might infiltrate their village at any given moment.

Moments after the explosion, the villagers are afflicted with a peculiar epidemic that alters both their features and behavior. Their hair falls out, they become sensitive to light and sound, and they grow lethargic. The author gives no direct explanation for this, and so the reader is left to draw their own conclusions. The residents express a state of collective fear and loss amid this state of confusion. What ensues: all that was once familiar is gone.

The novel teems with memorable characters, most notably Imam Ayoub, who finds himself powerless to understand what’s happening, and begins to doubt everything he has ever believed in. Alongside Ayoub, Khalil Al Khouja, a powerful state representative who has long taken hold of narratives through media, publishes a paper called the Voice of War, and begins to recruit the village’s youth. Hakim, his mute son, soon comes into play. There’s also Shawahi, a woman seemingly unaffected by the epidemic, who is seen by the villagers as a symbol of freedom.

As the story progresses, the narrative style shifts to multiple narrators. We follow eight different characters from across the village, each narrating their own version of events. Despite the differing interpretations of the crisis, the main theme remains clear. This is a novel that doesn’t build its world around an epidemic, but rather around the loss of trust, humanity’s helplessness in the face of what it cannot understand, and what questions arise when no answers are found.

The Prayer of Anxiety is a novel to be savored. It’s a work akin to a dream — with no clear ending nor beginning. Nada tackles pivotal issues with his own signature prose, shifting between realism and surrealism without losing the plot. In the end, the reader is left with one fundamental question: how do you survive in a world where everything has lost its meaning?

WHERE TO GET IT- You can find the book in Arabic at Shorouk, Diwan, Aseer Al Kotob, Bibliothek, and Al Masriah Al Lubnaniah.

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