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An offbeat tale of creativity, friendship, and finding your voice in this uproarious journey through Cairo's music scene in the early 2000s, where everything from American rock to Egyptian popular songs cultivates big dreams
WINNER OF THE SAWIRIS CULTURAL AWARD
Following a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, “Local,” as he is known to his friends, moves from Alexandria to Cairo. In his new apartment, he discovers an old accordion, while his roommate unexpectedly decides to take up the saxophone, despite never having touched one before. And so, in the blistering summer heat, the two of them, without any formal training, dive into their first musical experiment: they put his mother’s cookbook to music.
Along with an eccentric assortment of acquaintances and occasional bandmates, Local crashes through his twenties and in and out of Cairo hangouts, heated debates on different music scenes, and various impromptu jam sessions and attempts at musical production.
This is a raucous journey through offbeat downtown Cairo in the early 2000s and the music of the era, from Mohamed Mounir to Pink Floyd. Suffused with a sardonic humor and full of hilarious observations, Red Like Orange vividly chronicles life lived just outside the mainstream.
“The author’s lighthearted and humorous storytelling draws you in, and more importantly, leaves you blissfully immersed.”—al-Ketaba
“Delightful and unclassifiable, it doesn’t rely on scripted formulas . . . I devoured it in one sitting.”—el-Maraya
"A fantastically talented Egyptian author"—ArabLit
Charles Akl is a writer and a journalist and has worked as a music producer and theater director. Red Like Orange won the Sawiris Cultural Award for Best Literary Work in the Young Writers category in 2023, and is his first novel to be translated into English. He is the author of a collection of essays, Food for the Copts, and of a graphic novel, Jellybird, which was a finalist in the 6th Mahmoud Kahil Award in 2021. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and he now lives in Bonn in Germany.
Sarah Enany is a literary translator and a professor in the English Department of Cairo University. She is a recipient of the Banipal Prize for Literary Translation for her translation of The Girl with Braided Hair (Hoopoe Fiction, 2020). She has translated several operas including the acclaimed sung versions of Les Miserables and Mozart's The Magic Flute into Egyptian Arabic, and Sayed Higab's libretto for the opera Miramar into English. She is also the translator of Witness to War and Peace: Egypt, the October War, and Beyond, The Book Smuggler, and the Jewish Muslim trilogy (all AUC Press).