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 self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two belligerent classmates. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. A Kuwaiti woman returns to her family after being held captive in Iraq for a decade.

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. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people - and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.

'A densely imagined and beautifully written debut.' - Sydney Morning Herald

'With her compassion for an old, vanished world and her exceptional eye for the bruised landscape of the modern Middle East, Al-Nakib should be heralded as an exciting new literary voice.' - The National