Books from Bahrain

Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems collects work by Bahraini poet Qassim Haddad, combining a long central poem with a selection spanning roughly four decades of his writing. The title piece reworks the old Arabic story of Majnun and Layla, a tale of obsessive, unrequited love that dates back to at least the seventh century and has been retold across Persian, Turkish, and South Asian literary traditions for centuries.

In Haddad's version, the familiar narrative is reshaped through a postmodern lens. The poem plays with the idea of oral transmission itself, acknowledging how stories shift and fracture as they pass between tellers. A small cast of secondary characters appears alongside the central figures, and Layla is given a more active presence than in many earlier tellings. She is portrayed as someone conscious of her own desires and willing to voice them, a departure from versions that kept her largely silent or idealized. The poem steps away from the tribal and moralistic framing that marked older retellings.

The accompanying selection of shorter poems offers a broader view of Haddad's concerns and style across different periods. Together, the two parts of the volume place a single ambitious rewriting alongside the wider body of work from which it grew.

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Lugma is a cookbook by Noor Murad, a chef raised in Bahrain and now based in London. The Arabic word lugma refers to a bite of food, and Murad has built her career around tasting and refining dishes. She previously co-authored two Ottolenghi Test Kitchen cookbooks, and this collection turns toward the cooking traditions she grew up with in the Gulf region.

The recipes draw on several overlapping food cultures. Gulf cooking contributes elaborate rice dishes and black limes, a dried ingredient that adds a sharp, earthy sourness. Iranian influences appear through herbs and sour flavors, while Indian cooking brings spice and chilli heat. Levantine traditions add another layer of fresh, bright ingredients. Murad presents both traditional preparations and her own adaptations, shaped by years of professional kitchen work in London.

Bahrain sits as a small island nation in the Persian Gulf, and its food reflects centuries of trade links with Iran, India, and the wider Arab world. The book uses that geographic position as a starting point, treating Murad's personal background as a way to organize a broad and varied set of Middle Eastern dishes rather than limiting the scope to a single national cuisine.

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QuixotiQ follows two men whose separate troubles eventually pull them toward each other. Guy Kelton lives alone, cut off from his family, weighed down by a dream that fell apart. His frustration drives him toward increasingly violent and reckless choices, dragging him into dangerous territory he cannot easily leave. Patrick Roymint, meanwhile, is in his mid-twenties and still processing the loss of his entire family years earlier. When he finally decides to rebuild his life, he finds himself drawn into the hidden criminal underworld of a small, declining place called Okay County.

The novel is written by Ali Al Saeed, an author from Bahrain. The title echoes the word quixotic, suggesting characters chasing goals that may be out of reach or shaped by delusion. Both Guy and Patrick encounter strange, unsettling events that force them to reconsider what they know about their own histories. As the story progresses, their separate paths reveal unexpected links, tied together by forces neither man fully understands.

The book sits at an intersection of psychological tension, mystery, and dark discovery. Its two storylines run in parallel before converging, and its subject matter covers hate, love, buried secrets, and the slow, difficult process of confronting who you are. The setting of Okay County, small and shrinking, gives the story a closed, pressured atmosphere.

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The Pearl Thief is a short story by Noor Al Noaimi set in Bahrain, centered on a young man named Hassan. He lives in poverty with his ageing parents and feels the pressure of being unable to provide for them. With few options available, Hassan decides to try pearl diving, a trade historically central to Bahrain's coastal economy, despite one significant problem: he cannot swim.

Pearl diving in the Arabian Gulf was for centuries a dangerous seasonal occupation. Divers descended on a single breath, weighted by stones, searching the seabed for oysters that might or might not contain a pearl. For someone without basic swimming ability, entering this world carries obvious physical risk. Hassan's decision is shaped less by ambition than by the absence of alternatives, and the story follows him as he confronts both the water and the social assumptions tied to his background.

The narrative explores questions of class, capability, and self-worth in a specific Bahraini setting. Hassan's struggle is not only against the sea but against the expectation that a poor man's son will remain poor. Al Noaimi keeps the story compact, using the pearl diving premise to frame a single character's attempt to change his circumstances.

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Yummah follows Khadeeja, a girl in Bahrain whose childhood ends abruptly when she is given in an arranged marriage to a much older man. Shortly after the wedding, her mother dies, leaving Khadeeja with a husband she barely knows and two brothers she has never met. Over time she builds a genuine bond with her husband, and what begins as an obligation slowly becomes a shared life.

That life is tested repeatedly. The death of her young son from a scorpion sting brings deep grief, and before she can recover, her husband leaves without explanation. Khadeeja is left alone with eight children and a ninth on the way, responsible for feeding and raising them with no support. The novel traces how she manages day-to-day survival under these compounding losses, set against the social expectations placed on women in Bahrain across earlier generations.

Sarah A. Al Shafei structures the story around the stages of Khadeeja's life rather than a single dramatic arc. Each phase brings a different pressure, from early marriage to motherhood to abandonment, and the book stays close to the practical realities of each one. The title, Yummah, is an Arabic word used to address one's mother.

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