Amna, Nimo, Mouna – these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, climbs to the attic of their house where he sees her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 50s; as a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo; a self-made divorcee and a lover; a ‘pious mama’ in hijab; and a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister – who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years – in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.Hallucinatory, stylish, and erotic, 'The Dissenters' is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency. YOUSSEF RAKHA is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, The Crocodiles, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.“Youssef Rakha is the rare writer who is actually paying attention and trying to make sense of the world while many are devolving into despair. In The Dissenters, revolutions and their aftermath play the chord of unsung protagonists of History— not of the ones creating and disseminating grandiose lies and killing for them, but the ones willing to create a world outside the tinted windows of power, even if that means challenging the abyss.” – Yuri Herrera
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