Join us

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Newsletter
Cover: Guapa - Saleem Haddad

Saleem Haddad

Guapa

2019, pp. 368, Paperback
ISBN: 9781787702059
Region: Lebanon
Book collection: Europa B-formats
Available as ebook Available as ebook Available as ebook
£ 8.99

The book

A novel of the Arab Spring

Winner of the Polari First Book Prize 2017

A Middle-Eastern capital caught in the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. A day in the life of a young man disillusioned with both East and West and struggling to find a place for himself in a society ruled by hypocrisy and contradictions. Rasa works as an interpreter for Western journalists by day and divides his nights between the Guapa, an underground nightclub where the city’s clandestine LGBT community congregates, and his secret lover Taymour. Every night Taymour sneaks into the house Rasa shares with his overbearing grandmother, the woman who raised him. When she finds them in bed together on the eve of Taymour’s wedding day, all hell breaks loose. That same day Rasa learns his best friend, the famous drag queen Majid, has been arrested by the police. Unable to go home, afraid for Majid’s fate, and heartbroken by Taymour’s determination to keep living a double life, Rasa’s fragile balance collapses, while all around him the brief, intense season of public protest is cut short by the regime’s repression and the rapid rise of the hard-line Islamist movement.

Wry and aching, irresistibly funny at times, Guapa heralds the arrival of a strong new voice from the Arabic world.

“Freewheeling and incendiary.”
London Review of Books

Guapa offers an intimate, complex portrait of gay life in the Arab world, a subject rarely explored in fiction.”
Gay Times

“This immensely readable novel is fluent, passionate and emotionally honest. Equally astute in its analysis of Arab and American mores, the book’s characters are nuanced and dynamic; it gives fresh life to the maxim 'the personal is political'.”
The Guardian

“…vibrant, wrenching début novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood.”
The New Yorker

“Family, identity, and politics collide in Haddad’s debut . . . The topic of gay life in the Arab world is richly complex, and Haddad’s cinematic, evocative prose rises to meet the sensitive subject matter.”
Publisher’s Weekly

“A remarkable debut.”
The Huffington Post

Guapa sets Haddad up as a literary voice capable of narrating untold stories of the modern gay experience, from one of the most complicated parts of the world.”
Attitude Magazine

The author

Saleem Haddad
Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City in 1983 to a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Iraqi-German mother, and educated in Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as an aid worker with Médecins Sans Frontières in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, and currently lives in London, where he advises on inclusion of refugees, women, and young people in the transition and peace processes of the Arab Spring.
http://www.saleemhaddad.com/
@sysh

Reviews

More suggestions

  • Cover: Fathers and Fugitives - S J Naudé

    S J Naudé

    Fathers and Fugitives

    2025, pp. 192, £ 9.99
    An inventive and emotionally charged novel about fatherhood and family, loyalty and betrayal, inheritance and belonging.
  • Cover: The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen - Shokoofeh Azar

    Shokoofeh Azar

    The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen

    2025, pp. 400, £ 16.99
    From International Booker Prize finalist Shokoofeh Azar, a stylistically audacious and emotionally powerful novel about one large, complicated family...
  • Cover: All That Remains - Virginie Grimaldi

    Virginie Grimaldi

    All That Remains

    2025, pp. 284, £ 10.99
    A funny and moving story of unlikely friendship from the internationally bestselling author of A Good Life
  • Cover: Shibboleth - Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

    Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

    Shibboleth

    2025, pp. 384, £ 14.99
    A darkly comic tale that brings the satirical English campus novel into the divided, multicultural, hyperactive present day.
  • Cover: City of Fiction - Yu Hua

    Yu Hua

    City of Fiction

    2025, pp. 352, £ 14.99
    A story of love, blood and dreams, set in early 20th century China
  • Cover: The Brittle Age - Donatella Di Pietrantonio

    Donatella Di Pietrantonio

    The Brittle Age

    2025, pp. 192, £ 14.99
    A powerful mother-and-daughter story, a profound exploration of human fragility, and of the haunting shadows of the past