Bringing Award-Winning International Best-Sellers to Arabic Readers for the First Time

Dubai, United Arab Emirates - Rewayat, a subsidiary of Kalimat Group – one of the leading publishing houses in the Middle East – has launched 15 international best-sellers in Arabic at the Sharjah International Book Fair 2017. Rewayat specialises in Arabic and translated fiction and non-fiction, and is focused on making the world’s best-loved books available to a wider Arabic reading audience than ever before.

Rewayat’s new publications include some of the world’s most celebrated literature, such as ‘Chronicles’ from the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature and arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the world, Bob Dylan. This remarkable book explores critical junctures in his life and provides readers with a mesmerising window onto Dylan’s thoughts and influences.

Award-winning novelists feature heavily in Rewayat’s newly launched portfolio, which includes a wide range of Pulitzer and Man Booker Prize winners, among other prestigious literary accolades. Colson Whitehead’s New York Times best-seller ‘The Underground Railroad’ won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, and is a magnificent tour de force that chronicles a young slave's epic journey as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. ‘Autumn’ is the first instalment of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet and won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for its meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, and for its powerful story about ageing, time, love, and stories themselves.

Man Booker Prize winners include Julian Barnes’ ‘The Sense of an Ending’, an intense novel that follows Tony Webster as he contends with his past when his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, and Graham Swift’s ‘Last Orders’, which tells the extraordinary journey of four men who taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds and deliver his ashes to the sea. For customers who enjoy ‘Last Orders’, a second Graham Swift novel entitled ‘Mothering Sunday’ is also available from Rewayat and provides an emotionally soaring and profoundly moving work of fiction that weaves a love story across the twentieth century.

The power of books to cast readers into other cultures is captured by new Rewayat titles like Souad Mekhennet’s ‘I Was Told to Come Alone’, which charts Mekhennet’s journey behind the lines of Jihad, starting in the German neighbourhoods where 9/11 plotters were radicalised and culminating on the Turkish/Syrian border region where ISIS was a daily presence. The memoir also provides insights into her chilling run-ins with various intelligence services and some of the world’s most wanted men.

Encompassing all types of literature, Rewayat has also launched beloved classics including two highly contrasting titles from Truman Capote – ‘In Cold Blood’ and ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’. ‘In Cold Blood’ is a suspense-filled and tragic crime novel that reconstructs the 1959 murder of four members of the Clutter family, and charts the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’ is an entirely different and wholly charming masterpiece about the witty, naïve Holly Golightly, who has entered the American idiom for her belief that “nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany’s”. The special volume of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’ released by Rewayat also includes three of Capote’s best-known stories – ‘House of Flowers’, ‘A Diamond Guitar’, and ‘A Christmas Memory’.

Other classics on Rewayat’s list are Hjalmar Söderberg’s ‘Doctor Glas’, which was enormously controversial when first published in 1905 and juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-siècle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a lonely and introspective man besieged by obsession, as well as three titles from James Baldwin: ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain’, ‘Giovanni's Room’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’.

Each of Baldwin’s novels is a classic in its own right. With lyrical precision, psychological directness and resonating symbolic power, ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain’ chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of his identity as the stepson of the minister at a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem, while ‘Giovanni's Room’ is the story of another young man who finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ captures Baldwin’s skill in creating characters that have become unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche, telling the moving tale of the love between Tish and Fonny in the face of injustice and an uncertain future.

Rewayat is also making more modern classics available with titles like Ian McEwans’s ‘The Cement Garden’ – which follows four children who find themselves abruptly orphaned and are forced to cast aside their childhood as the outside begins to bear down on them.

Rewayat uses advanced publishing methods and strives to become an open house for literary talent in the Gulf region, the Arab world and beyond. Through its wide-ranging distribution channels, Rewayat’s books are available to the public in various bookstores as well as at local and international book fairs.

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© Press Release 2017