Abu Hariba

Author's name: Youssef El Sherif

In his new novel, Youssef El Sherif embarks on a different adventure, a unique journey, presenting an extraordinary love story and a novel that interweaves reality with fantasy, prose with poetry. Ultimately, he presents this unique text, which represents the city's complexity within the entanglements of individuals who wanted to become heroes but were content with the margins and the dim light behind the scenes. A love story whose hero decides to transform its events into a fictional text, narrating what happened with the names of its real characters. However, the conditions of the institution responsible for publishing the novel, for which he himself works as a literary editor, do not allow this degree of approach to exposing the hidden and peeling back the "truth." This forces him to circumvent not only the authority of the institution, but the authority of the entire existence that restricts him. So, he resorts to parallel stories to distance himself from what he was forbidden from telling. Thus, he addresses the myth twice, in different temporal dimensions; once with the story of the saint "Abu Hariba", and once with the discovery of the body of Isis of the past within the body of Isis of the present... so that the novel becomes like a literary phoenix rising from the ashes of the ancestors, raising its head in the sky of this moment. It is a unique novel, adding a new space to the ambitious project of the author of "Al-Sanadiqiya"; where the novel itself is part of a larger story, so that Youssef steps towards renewal and experimentation; in search of a different writing, a writing that resembles only its author