A GIRL MADE OF DUST

Fiction (Literary Fiction) 236 pages

Fourth Estate - August 2008

 

Shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2008, the Waverton Good Read Award 2009, the Desmond Elliott Prize 2009 and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2010.

'I adored A GIRL MADE OF DUST...I could not put it down - It was at once tender and tragic...one of those books you can't help but think about long after you finish.' -- Patricia Wood, author of LOTTERY, short listed for 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction

‘Her well-crafted first novel offers a moving insight into a brutal conflict.’ -- Melissa McClements, Financial Times

'this moving portrait achieves a dark poetry.' -- Kirkus

A Middle Eastern TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. This poignant, warm and immensely readable novel is set in a Christian village in Lebanon at the time of the Israeli invasion of the 1980s, and seen through the eyes of a young girl, Ruba. She and her brother Naji, puzzled and frustrated by their father's withdrawal, decide he must be cursed by the local witch. When she finds a glass eye she decides she must use it to save her father from the curse, but as she sets about this, the war looms ever closer, bringing much change: Naji is becoming ever more interested in guns, her grandmother is having dreams of death, and charismatic Uncle Wadih arrives from Beirut.

But everything is not as it seems, as Ruba discovers her father's real and shocking story, and realises that Uncle Wadih has something to hide. When Israel invades Lebanon, and the war comes to their village, the family is forced to live in the corridor of their house, but even in the face of such conflict there is hope for redemption and a chance for her father to lead his family to a better future.