The Men Who Swallowed the Sun

CO-WINNER OF THE 2022 SAIF GHOBASH BANIPAL PRIZE This gritty tale of two mens ill-conceived quest for a better life via the deserts of the Middle East and the cities of Europe is pure storytelling Two Bedouin men from Egypts Western Desert seek to escape poverty through different routes. Onethe intellectual, terminally self-doubting, and avowedly autobiographical Hamdigets no further than southern Libyas fly-blown oasis of Sabha, while his cousinthe dashing, irrepressible Phantom Raidermakes it to the fleshpots of Milan. The backdrop of this darkly comic and unsentimental story of illegal immigration is a brutal Europe and Muammar Gaddafis rickety, rhetoric-propped Great State of the Masses, where the Leader fantasizes of welding Libyan and Egyptian Bedouin into a new self-serving political force, the Saad-Shin. Compelling and visceral, with a seductive, muscular irony, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is an unforgettable novel of two men and their fellow migrants and the extreme marginalization that drives them.