Publishers Weekly Online
November 2014

Rakha’s dizzying novel, set in Cairo between 1997 and the first days of 2012, disdains narrative arcs and linear chronology, perhaps because its focus is a group of young Egyptians who admire the freewheeling works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other Beats. The narrator, Youssef, and his friends form “The Crocodiles Movement for Secret Egyptian Poetry”, and spend their youth writing poetry and experimenting with sex, drugs, and booze. Behind them lurks the political unrest of Cairo, and once the Arab Spring reaches Egypt, one uprising …

Only the narrative of horror seems to cancel the cultural diversity among the most impermeable Western civilisation and the Arab one

Mostafa Khalifa’s is a scream from the silence of the prisons of the regime, a cry to be heard with the hope of freeing the future.

Mostafa Khalifa’s book is not only a complaint, but also bitter reflection on the horrors of which humans are guilty.

It is an essential reading because it shows that historical truth is not considered in today’s debate on Syria. Torture, summary executions, imprisonment of women, men and children in Syrian prisons has been the basis of power of the Assad family

“Crudely realistic, Ave Maris nevertheless plays with tenderness, irony and poetry. Common sense, illusion and laughter are opposed to the barbary of dogmatisms. Against violence and corrupt powers, shine the daily kindnesses, and magical encounters allowing life to take its course.”