Overview

WINNER OF THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2017 “A remarkable debut.” - The Huffington Post “Freewheeling and incendiary.” - London Review of Books “…vibrant, wrenching début novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood.” - The New Yorker 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. “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 “Guapa offers an intimate, complex portrait of gay life in the Arab world, a subject rarely explored in fiction.” - Gay Times

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9781787702059

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Reviews

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 * A remarkable debut. * Huffington Post * Guapa offers an intimate, complex portrait of gay life in the Arab world, a subject rarely explored in fiction. * Gay Times * A vibrant, wrenching debut novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood. * The New Yorker * 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 * Freewheeling and incendiary. * London Review of Books *

Freewheeling and incendiary. * London Review of Books * 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 * A vibrant, wrenching debut novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood. * The New Yorker * Guapa offers an intimate, complex portrait of gay life in the Arab world, a subject rarely explored in fiction. * Gay Times * A remarkable debut. * 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 *

Author Information

Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City in 1983 to a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Iraqi-German mother, and was educated in Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as an aid worker with Médecins Sans Frontières and other organisations in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and Iraq. His writing has appeared in Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Daily Beast, among other publications. 

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