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In a small Lebanese village a disillusioned imam, diagnosed with terminal cancer, must face his demons. Having consented to an arranged marriage, he has found himself in a loveless union and lusts after another. To please his family, he took up the robe and turban of his forefathers but the expected path to fulfillment did not unfold before him.
Meticulous, sparse prose quietly evokes the essence of rural life and the burden of tradition. Hassan Daoud’s masterful novel plumbs the depths of a man’s struggle with religion and his place in the world.
"Hassan Daoud is one of Lebanon's most important living writers."--Max Weiss, Princeton University
"The work's insights are Proustian in their precision. . . . The lucid, calm, uncluttered style gives the book a unique voice."--Humphrey Davies, translator of The Yacoubian Building
"A unique novel par excellence."--Rasheed El-Enany, Exeter University
Hassan Daoud (Author)
Hassan Daoud, born in Beirut in 1950, holds a master’s degree in Arabic literature and has taught creative writing at the Lebanese American University. He is the editorial director of al-Mudun news website and is on the editorial board of the quarterly magazine Kalamon. He is the author of three short story collections and ten novels. No Road to Paradise was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2015.
Marilyn Booth (Translated by)
Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English. Her translations of Omani author Jokha Alharthi include Bitter Orange Tree and Celestial Bodies, which was awarded the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Hoda Barakat, Elias Khoury, Latifa al-Zayyat, Zahran Alqasmi, and Nawal al-Saadawi. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.