The Bookseller’s Notebooks

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Jalal Barjas is a Jordanian literary author and journalist, writing in Arabic. A trained engineer, he worked as a newspaper editor and a journalist and has published in a range of genres, including poetry, short stories, novels, and literary articles.

After losing his job and refuge, Ibrahim, a bookseller, decides to live with the homeless people in his city, assuming the identities of the heroes of the novels he has read. Set between 1947 and 2019, this novel is based on several notebooks of stories about people facing different hardships. Their interwoven destinies reveal the value of the house, as a symbol of one's homeland, as opposed to the surrounding ruination. In intensely poetic language, Barjas throws light on a totally schizophrenic reality in his country in this winner of the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

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