The Silence of the Killers

Author: Tarek Imam

"I am the killer who risks his life to leave the world his poems as he wishes them to be: written by a hand without a history, with the blood of victims, at the expense of a struggling sister..." A serial killer, roaming like a ghost in Cairo's neighborhoods, entering its homes, disguised behind his job in population census, meticulously choosing his victims, as one chooses the words of a poem. "Salem," the killer, is also the poet who, with every victim he kills with his right hand, writes a poem with his left hand, to complete his strange collection. In "The Silence of the Killers" - which has won several prestigious awards and continues to receive critical and public acclaim - Tarek Imam presents a deep, contemplative novel within a detective plot, exploring the great city in its unseen, secret depths. He moves between abandoned cemeteries, forgotten saints' festivals on the fringes, cellars of poor homes and their dangerous rooftops, and the corridors of neglected workplaces; to reveal a new face of a city united despite the crowd of its inhabitants. Through a profound use of myth, fantasy, and Sufi texts, Imam reads the city in moments of killing that - ironically - awaken it from its death, to redefine it and redefine the individual with a single knife stroke.