The Hidden Light of Objects

A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country’s growing hostility towards the West.

A self-conscious Palestinian teenager is drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two belligerent classmates.

A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife.

A Kuwaiti woman returns to her family after being held captive in Iraq for a decade. The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes.

But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived – adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind.

Mai Al-Nakib’s luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people – and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.