Eastern Mediterranean authors to know
Discover essential Eastern Mediterranean authors and their iconic books, from Naguib Mahfouz’s *Akhenaten* to Shulamith Hareven’s *Thirst* and *Iron Earth, Copper Sky*. Explore curated fiction that captures the region’s rich history, culture, and literary depth—perfect for readers seeking transformative Eastern Mediterranean literature.
Book
Akhenaten
by Naguib Mahfouz
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. In this beguiling novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.
Book
Thirst
by Shulamith Hareven
Three novellas by an Israeli woman writer. The Miracle Hater is on a man who loses his faith, Prophet is on a prophet who loses his powers, and After Childhood is on a marriage between a woman from the hills and a man from the plain.
