Art & Culture

The Best Newly Translated Arabic Books to to Get You Out of Your Reading Slump

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 23, 2026

There are books you read, and then there are books that completely hijack your attention. The kind you open intending to read a chapter and suddenly find yourself three hours later, emotionally destabilized, ignoring every group chat notification lighting up your phone and wondering when it got dark outside. This reading list leans heavily into that second category.

Alongside buzzy new fiction and cult-favorite reissues, there has also been a noticeable rise in newly translated Arabic literature making its way onto English-language shelves, offering stories that feel far richer and stranger than the algorithm-friendly novels currently dominating TikTok recommendations. From Cairo rooftops and Iraqi exile communities to East London council offices, these books move across cities, memories, and political realities without ever feeling heavy-handed or didactic. Some are funny in deeply bleak ways, while others are intimate enough to feel almost intrusive. All of them deserve a place in your reading list.

‘A Mask, the Color of the Sky’ by Basim Khandaqji

Written from an Israeli prison, where Palestinian author Basim Khandaqji has been incarcerated since 2004, A Mask, the Color of the Sky won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction before arriving in English translation by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp in 2026. The novel follows Nur, a Palestinian archaeologist living in a refugee camp near Ramallah, who discovers a blue Israeli identity card tucked inside the pocket of an old coat. He begins using the card, and the identity of its Jewish Israeli owner, to access places ordinarily closed to him, eventually joining an archaeological excavation at an Israeli settlement. What begins as an experiment in passing becomes a sharp, unsettling exploration of identity, land, history, and who is granted the freedom to move through all three.

‘Red Like Orange‘ by Charles Akl

If you have ever wanted to disappear into Cairo’s underground music scene circa the early 2000s, Red Like Orange will happily take you there. Newly translated into English by Sarah Enany, Charles Akl’s novel follows a young Alexandrian who leaves his hometown for Cairo after a breakup and falls in with a circle of musicians, artists, and assorted characters trying to figure out adulthood in a city that rarely gives anyone much room to breathe. Music runs through the novel, but so do friendship, heartbreak, ambition, and the particular chaos of being young and convinced your life is about to become something. Against a Cairo shaped by the final years of Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Akl captures a generation finding escape and community in the city’s alternative cultural scene, making the novel as much a portrait of a time and place as it is a coming-of-age story.

‘Circle of Spices’ by Salha Obaid

Written by Emirati author Salha Obaid and newly translated into English by Nour Jaljuli and Sawad Hussain, the novel follows Sherehan, a woman with an extraordinarily acute sense of smell who experiences the people, places, and memories around her through scent. As her story moves across decades of enormous social and economic change in the UAE, familiar smells become markers of family, desire, grief, and a world transforming at remarkable speed. Longlisted for the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Obaid’s novel offers an intimate portrait of Emirati life through a wonderfully unusual sensory lens, where spices, perfumes, homes, and bodies can reveal as much about a person as anything they might say aloud.

‘The War’ by Mohamed Alyahyai

In The War, Omani writer Mohamed Alyahyai follows a former soldier still haunted by his experiences during the Dhofar War, the conflict that gripped southern Oman from the 1960s until 1975. As memories of the battlefield begin bleeding into his present, certainty becomes increasingly difficult to hold onto, including his understanding of what happened and who actually made it home. Winner of the 2023 Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel and newly translated into English by Christiaan James, The War approaches a chapter of Omani history rarely encountered in English-language fiction through the fractured memory of someone who lived through it, exploring what violence leaves behind long after the fighting itself has stopped.

‘On the Greenwich Line’ by Shady Lewis

Part bureaucratic satire, part quiet existential spiral, On the Greenwich Line follows a local government employee in East London attempting to navigate Britain’s increasingly hostile immigration systems while organizing the funeral of a young Syrian refugee named Ghiyath. What could have easily become an overly political novel instead unfolds with deadpan humor, emotional restraint, and a deeply human perspective on displacement, austerity, and survival. Shady Lewis writes London in a way that feels grimy, exhausted, and strangely tender all at once, while translator Katharine Halls preserves the novel’s sharp cynicism beautifully.

‘The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer’ by Belal Fadl

Few books capture Cairo with the same chaotic affection as Belal Fadl’s The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer. Set in the city’s smoky apartments and crowded alleyways during the 1990s, the novel follows a teenage aspiring writer escaping an abusive household and landing among an unforgettable cast of misfits, chain-smokers, drifters, and emotionally volatile eccentrics. Darkly funny and surprisingly moving, the book explores class, masculinity, art, and survival without ever losing its absurdist edge.

‘Empty Cages’ by Fatma Qandil

Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Empty Cages is less a conventional novel and more an unfiltered excavation of memory, grief, violence, and family. The story begins with something deceptively ordinary, an old tin of chocolates, before unfolding into a deeply personal portrait of one Egyptian woman’s life across several decades. Fatma Qandil’s writing feels startlingly intimate, moving through childhood, illness, addiction, motherhood, and loss with a level of honesty that can feel almost uncomfortable at times. Translator Adam Talib preserves the rawness and poetic texture of Qandil’s voice beautifully, making this one of the most emotionally resonant translated Arabic books to emerge in recent years.

‘Notes from a Lost Country’ by Sinan Antoon

Sinan Antoon has spent years writing some of the most important literary work to emerge from post-war Iraq, and Notes from a Lost Country continues that trajectory with devastating precision. The novel follows two Iraqi men living in exile in the United States. One is an elderly retired doctor in Brooklyn slowly disappearing into dementia and memories of Iraq before the war. The other is a young deserter carrying both physical and emotional scars after fleeing the Iraqi army. Their lives gradually intersect in ways that reveal how memory, exile, and trauma continue to shape identity long after people leave home. This is not necessarily a light beach read in the traditional sense, but it is exactly the kind of immersive, reflective novel summer often creates space for.

Main image: Instagram/@slowreadingola

The Best Newly Translated Arabic Books to to Get You Out of Your Reading Slump

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