If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English: A Novel

Winner of the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel PrizeWinner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for FictionShortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller PrizeShortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardShortlisted for the 2022 VCU Cabell First Novelist AwardWinner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire.In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a caf in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants returning to a country shes never been to before, teaching English and living in a lightfilled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desirefor one another, for the selves they want to become through the othertakes a violent turn that neither of them expected.A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Nagas experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twentyfirstcentury world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?