by Youssef Rakha
published 27 February 2025
Amna, Nimo, Mouna – these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, climbs to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s; as a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo; a self-made divorcee and a lover; a ‘pious mama’ donning her hijab; and, finally, as a feminist activist during the Arab Spring.
Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister – who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years – in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.
Hallucinatory, stylish, and erotic, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.
YOUSSEF RAKHA is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, The Crocodiles, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.
Praise for The Dissenters
“The Dissenters is an encyclopedia of all the ways bodies are imprisoned or made free—by politics, sex, power, love, death. An Egypt of the senses, mind, and heart, laid open and dissected in every manner. This book will seduce you from its opening pages and stun you with its last. A tremendous, confident novel from Youssef Rakha, assuming his rightful place on the literary stage.” Bina Shah
“A stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and nonconformist set of characters whose lives set them on a collision course with Egypt’s military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath.” Amitav Ghosh
“Youssef Rakha is the rare writer who is actually paying attention and trying to make sense of the world while many are devolving into despair. In The Dissenters, revolutions and their aftermath play the chord of unsung protagonists of History— not of the ones creating and disseminating grandiose lies and killing for them, but the ones willing to create a world outside the tinted windows of power, even if that means challenging the abyss.” Yuri Herrera
“One of the most original and inventive writers of his generation.” Omar Robert Hamilton