3.5 rounded to 4.
Thanks to Netgalley and Yale University Press for a copy in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Warda is a book about important things: places, histories, people, ideas. Reading it felt like taking a long series of history lessons. I learned a heck of a lot I didn't know about Middle East politics during the mid 2oth century.

Sometimes Warda's voice and personality shone through so strongly that I wanted to keep reading. She's passionate, composed, intelligent, and dedicated. Through Warda, I heard so many ideas and complexities of the political systems she fought for and against. I understood her, even if I can't endorse her type of actions.

Many times, though, it felt like anyone could have written the words of her POV journal entries. They sounded copied from a history book. That got stale, and many entries felt repetitive. It wore me down, which may have been the intended effect to showcase a possible repetitive weariness of war and revolution. If so, that's a brilliant strategy. I only know that I felt I had the personality of Warda at 36% and the rest felt less fresh and intriguing.

I'd recommend Warda to anyone with interests in recent history, especially global politics or recent Middle East history and revolutionary politics.

1950s Cairo: the intersection of conflicting dreams and political destinies. In this classic novel translated for the first time into English, idealistic reporter Rushdy encounters the enchanting Warda at a clandestine leftist meeting. Their fates would be forever linked. After Warda goes missing, Rushdy immerses himself in her diaries in a quest to uncover her whereabouts. The quest takes him to the hills of Dhofar, Oman, where he discovers Warda’s guerrilla role in a regional uprising and secret involvement in revolutions with echoes around the globe. Piece by revelatory piece, Rushdy uncovers the truth about Warda—and the fiery commitment that drove her to choose the life she lived.

Widely acknowledged as a masterpiece by one of Egypt’s most important novelists, this is an unforgettable story of intrigue, passion, and revolution.
An interesting read and recommend ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This 2000 novel from acclaimed Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim is not an easy read, dealing as it does with Middle Eastern and in particular Omani politics in the 1960s and 1970s, an era which will be unfamiliar to many readers in the west. The basic plot is straightforward enough. The narrator Rushdy returns to Oman after an absence of 30 years in the hope of reconnecting with Yaarib and his sister Warda, whom he met whilst studying there. The search seems hopeless at first, until one day he is handed a stack of notebooks which turn out to be diaries written by Warda after she becomes a guerrilla fighter in Oman’s Dhofar War. These diaries include excerpts from books, newspapers and speeches from left-wing and communist leaders such as Nasser and Castro, and Ward’s own commentaries on revolutionary movements and struggles throughout the world. Thus the narrative becomes more documentary than novel, and although intrinsically illuminating, I found it all became quite tedious. The two strands of the novel, Rushdy’s fictional quest and the non-fiction elements of Warda’s diaries didn’t meld satisfactorily for me, and I felt that Warda was being held up as an exemplary revolutionary woman rather than a fully-fledged character. I felt little empathy for her or Rushdy and failed to engage with them. I appreciated learning about Oman’s history and its current regime, which Rushdy discovers as he travels around the country on his quest, and indeed it was a pleasure to read a novel set in Oman, but overall I really didn’t enjoy the book.