In his new novel, "Tamara, The Rest is Coming," Nidal Assaf chronicles the phenomenon of rape, telling the story of women in a patriarchal society. Faced with the masculine practices of her community, Tamara becomes distressed by what happens to female victims of rape. She takes it upon herself to defend them, carry their cause, and give voice to their struggle, until she herself falls victim to rape.

Nidal Assaf addresses this phenomenon through the story of Tamara, the novel's central character, and the other secondary characters who revolve around her with their different stories; the existence of the other characters is conditional on the presence of the main character. Each character in the work has a role to play in expressing the injustice inflicted upon women. We encounter the first victim in the novel, the "mother," whom her husband left with three children—Tamara, Nabil, and Malak—for another woman seven years his senior, coveting her wealth. We meet "Maysoun," the friend who was raped in a cemetery, her only crime being that she went out one night to find medicine for her sick mother. We also meet "Rahaf," Tamara's butterfly-like cousin, who was married off to a man forty years older as part of a deal her father made with "Sheikh Reda," selling her like a goat in exchange for marrying the Sheikh's widowed sister, who had inherited a great deal of property and money from her deceased husband.

Then we encounter Tamara herself, who also falls victim to rape in India, the country she chose to complete her medical studies. One evening, she went out late to find a phone to check on her family, only for her and the city to wake up to a brief news item in a newspaper: "The city of Delhi awoke yesterday morning to a heinous crime, as an expatriate female medical student was assaulted by a gang of three people in a car. She was pursued by two individuals, and when she tried to escape to the street, they cornered her."

This is what the novel conveys through a narrative style that avoids complexity and favors simple techniques. It employs the omniscient narrator technique, behind which the novelist hides to express his narrative vision and direct the events. He maintains a sequence between successive narrative units in an unbroken line, with each unit illuminating a new event and adding it to the storytelling process. The novelist has chosen a title for each unit, such as (Virginity - The Letters - New Delhi - London).

Author: Nidal Assaf
Publisher: Arab Scientific Publishers-Beirut
Year of Publication: 2014
Number of Pages: 94
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9786140110717