Siraj by Radwa Ashour

About the novel: The novel is based on a game, where I portray an imaginary place, and in the background of this imagined place, I see a real history, creating a connection between the two places. In the imagination, there is an island I envision somewhere between the coast of Zanzibar and Yemen, and the time is in the last third of the 19th century. Part of the novel includes the real events of the bombing of Alexandria. Through the imagined and historical places, I wanted to write a "story" that we still live some of its variations today, describing the situation of the besieged people between the hammer of invaders and the anvil of tyrant rulers. It is an attempt to approach the old tale and to liberate, in one way or another, from the conventional novel form.