Mama Hissa's Mice
Book Feature - Mama Hissa's Mice by Saud Alsanousi
HBL Note: What a beautiful book cover, am I right? Kudos to the book jacket designer on this one. Those colors are brilliant. Mama Hissa’s Mice is an emotional story about friendship but also, more broadly, about finding yourself and a reason to keep pressing on in the face of challenges and adversity. The story follows Katkout, Fahd, and Sadiq - three friends who are fighting against the violence between religious and ethnic divide in their home country of Kuwait. Just reading the synopsis of the story, I get a sense of the emotional weight and the rise of humanity that will occur in this tale. Read it, and enjoy.
From the publisher:
From the author of The Bamboo Stalk and 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.
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.
