Rich and multilayered, with elements of both memoir and fiction, Dominique Eddé's Kite defies categorization. Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late '80s, it is at once a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between Mali and Farid and the simultaneous decline of Egyptian-Lebanese society. Densely populated with myriad characters, Kite chronicles the casualties of social conventions, religious divisions and cultural clichés. The differences between East and West are central to the tension of Eddé's book and share the responsibility for an unavoidable impasse between the lovers. This fragmented narrative—written in several voices that reflect the fragmented lives of those caught up in the madness of war—calls into question an entire way of living and thinking.

Born in Lebanon, Dominique Eddé is the author of several novels including Pourquoi il fait si sombre? (Why is it so Dark?) as well as an essay on Jean Genet and a book of interviews with the psychoanalyst André Green. She lives in Turkey.

Sons of revolutionaries, two friends must grow up and find themselves when President-for-Life Robert Mugabe tightens his grip on white landowners and plunges Zimbabwe into anarchy. Julie Wakeman-Linn's striking debut—-part buddy road trip, part familial dramedy—focuses on two racially blended families as they outwit the world of diplomats, ex-pats, safari tourists, street rats, border guards, and the mercurial landscape. The result is an electrifying video capture of Africa in 1997 overflowing with intense color, tenacious characters, and riotous details. See our article on this book in this issue of Belletrista.

What is life like for women in the Middle East? As the region continues to make headlines, more and more people in the West have begun to ask this question. Unfortunately, stereotypes abound. In Memory of a Promise: Short Stories by Middle Eastern Women, female authors from sixteen nations, from Morocco to Uzbekistan, provide a look at a broad range of women's experiences and do much to dispel notions of the region as homogenous. Editor Annes McCann-Baker worked closely with authors and translators to create this selection of short stories that showcases the talents of both established women writers in the region and those just beginning their career. The varied list of authors included in this collection ranges from Goli Taraghi to Hoda Barakat and Orly Castel-Bloom to Erendiz Atasu.

Self-exiled in Paris, after losing an arm in the Algerian war of liberation and becoming disillusioned with the corruption of his newly independent country, the narrator Khaled has taken up painting as a form of therapy. Many years later, at an exhibition of his work in Paris, he is visited by Hayat, the daughter of a close friend and legendary fighter who had given his life for the revolt. Khaled, who had known Hayat as a child, now falls for the woman she has become and for her chosen art as a novelist. Hayat, who he sees as the manifestation of his home city of Constantine, makes him forget his French girlfriend and for the first time in years start to confront his feelings about Algeria. He is rivaled in his affections, however, by a Palestinian poet and by a senior-ranking government official who Hayat eventually decides to marry.

Memory in the Flesh, the first novel written by an Algerian woman to become a bestseller in Arabic, centres on Algeria's struggle against foreign domination, capturing four decades of that nation's tumultuous history. This award-winning novel is told in the narrative voice of Khaled, a former revolutionary and painter who has lost his left arm in the struggle against France, and centres upon his love affair with the novelist Hayat, a woman many years his junior and the daughter of his former commander.

Algerian novelist and poet Ahlem Mosteghanemi is a best-selling author in the Arab world. The Arabic original of this title (Zakirat al Jasad) was awarded the 1998 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. It has since been translated into English and French and has been adapted into a television series. The Art of Forgetting, Mosteghanemi's elegant and warm-hearted meditation on surviving the ravages of love, was published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing. She lives in Beirut.