Mama Hissa's Mice

From the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction comes an apocalyptic and caustically funny novel about the power of friendship in a war-torn world that NPR calls “rich and resonant.”

Growing up together in the Surra section of central Kuwait, Katkout, Fahd, and Sadiq share neither ethnic origin nor religious denomination—only friendship and a rage against the unconscionable sectarian divide turning their lives into war-zone rubble. To lay bare the ugly truths, they form the protest group Fuada’s Kids. Their righteous transgressions have made them targets of both Sunni and Shi’a extremists. They’ve also elicited the concern of Fahd’s grandmother, Mama Hissa, a story-spinning font of piety, wisdom, superstition, and dire warnings, who cautions them that should they anger God, the sky will surely fall.

Then one day, after an attack on his neighborhood leaves him injured, Katkout regains consciousness. His friends are nowhere to be found. Inundated with memories of his past, Katkout begins a search for them in a world that has become unrecognizable but not forsaken.

Snaking through decades of Kuwaiti history well into a cataclysmic twenty-first century, Mama Hissa’s Mice is a harrowing, emotional, and caustic novel of rebellion. It also speaks to the universal struggle of finding one’s identity and a reason to go on, even after the sky has fallen.

Saud Alsanousi is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist born in 1981. He won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for The Bamboo Stalk in 2013, and Mama Hissa’s Mice was nominated for the 2016/17 Sheikh Zayed Book Award. His first novel, The Prisoner of Mirrors, was published in 2010 and won the fourth Laila al-Othman Prize, a prestigious award for novels and short stories by young writers. He also won first prize for his story, “The Bonsai and the Old Man,” in the July 2011 Stories on the Air competition organized by Al-Arabi magazine with BBC Arabic. In October 2016, the Gulf Cooperation Council presented Alsanousi with the Contribution to Literature Award in Riyadh. His work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi, Al-Kuwait, and Al-Abwab magazines. He currently writes for Al-Qabas newspaper.

Sawad Hussain is an Arabic translator and litterateur who is passionate about all things related to Arab culture, history, and literature. She has regularly critiqued Arabic literature in translation for ArabLit and Asymptote, among others; reviewed Arabic literature and language textbooks for Al-’Arabiyya Journal (Georgetown University Press); and assessed Arabic works for English PEN Translation grants. She was coeditor of the Arabic-English portion of the seminal, award-winning Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014). Her upcoming translations include a Palestinian resistance classic by Sahar Khalifeh for Seagull Books and a Lebanese young adult novel for University of Texas Press. She holds an MA in Modern Arabic Literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies.