The Hidden Light of Objects
SynopsisPlot
A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country’s growing hostility towards the West. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived--adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind.
Story
About this book
The Hidden Light of Objects is a collection of short stories by Mai Al-Nakib, set largely in Kuwait and the wider Middle East. The stories follow ordinary people whose private lives intersect with larger political and social currents. In one, a girl renamed Amerika to mark the US role in Kuwait's liberation discovers that her name increasingly measures her country's shifting feelings toward the West. In another, a man facing terminal cancer reflects on his infidelities and his wife's persistent forgiveness. Other characters include a Palestinian teenager pulled toward violence by classmates and a Kuwaiti woman returning to her family after years of captivity in Iraq.
Al-Nakib is interested in the gap between headlines and the texture of daily experience. War, occupation, and religious tension form the backdrop, but the foreground belongs to adolescent attachments, strained marriages, and quiet personal losses. Everyday objects carry emotional weight in these stories, holding memories that outlast the events themselves.
Al-Nakib is a Kuwaiti author and academic. The collection draws on settings and histories specific to the Gulf region, grounding its fiction in recognizable geography and recent decades of political change across the Middle East.
