2023 Read Widely: The Middle East & North Africa

"The bestselling author of The Secretary tells the gripping story of the real roots of the Sunni-Shia conflict in Middle East in the 1979 Iran Revolution that changed the region forever"--

"From the expert who understands both sides of one of the world's most complex, controversial conflicts, a modern-day Guide for the Perplexed -- a primer on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian issue." --

"A CIA officer and his recruit arrive in war-ravaged Damascus to hunt for a killer. CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, supercharging Haddad's recruitment and creating unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy. But the cat-and-mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail...

"The extraordinary story of the women who took on the Islamic State and won In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. And yet that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of. The Islamic State by then had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around...

"Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including...

After he constructs a corpse from body parts found on the street, Hadi wants the government to prepare a proper burial, but when the corpse goes missing, a series of strange murders occur and Hadi realizes he has created a monster.

"Joseph, a literature student at Berkeley, is the son of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father. One day, a mysterious package arrives on his doorstep, pulling him into a mesmerizing adventure to uncover the tangled history that binds the two sides of his family"--Amazon.com.

After being denied permission to join her husband in America, an Iraqi refugee is trapped in Cairo during the aftermath of the 2011 revolution and must rely on a foolhardy attorney with feelings for her and a not entirely legal plan to get her out.

"This response to Camus's The Stranger is at once a love story and a political manifesto about post-colonial Algeria, Islam, and the irrelevance of Arab lives. He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus's classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name--Musa--and...

A suspenseful thriller based on true events follows the experiences of an American diplomat in Tehran who becomes a firsthand witness to the military violence, religious extremes, and political machinations of the Iranian Revolution.