Alia mamdouh biography

Published in another edition as "Naphthalene," this is a coming of age story set in Baghdad during the 1950s. The author reveals the experience of growing up female in impressionistic vignettes, sometimes soaring into sequences of magical realism. She opens a window for western readers into a Muslim world where women band together in their often sequestered lives, surviving in an alien patriarchy that both limits and emboldens them.

Huda, the young girl at the center of this story, is not easily intimidated by the circumstances of her world, growing up female, her mother dying of tuberculosis and her father a police officer whose moods swing wildly between sentimentality and violence, taking a second wife and deserting his family, sending his first wife away and leaving sister, son and daughter in the care of his mother. Huda's younger brother Adil, a sensitive soul, is lovingly drawn, and her young aunt waits for a proposal of marria

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