La casa dei notabili

Set in 1930s Tunisia against a backdrop of national turmoil and a search for identity, the novel follows the intertwined destinies of two prominent families: the conservative, patriarchal en-Neifer clan and the progressive, liberal ar-Rassa‛ family. The narrative centers on a tragic December night in 1935 that shattered the life of Zubaida ar-Rassa‛, the young wife of Mohsen en-Neifer. Accused of a clandestine affair with Taher al-Haddad, who is a real-life intellectual and champion of women’s rights, Zubaida is condemned to a lifetime of unhappiness, leaving a void filled only by suspicion and silence.

The mystery of that night is pieced together through the first-person accounts of eleven different narrators from both families, spanning from the 1940s to the present day. This "Chinese box" structure forces the reader to navigate a complex web of secrets, regrets, and conflicting memories to reconstruct the truth. As individual lives clash with the broader History of the country, the reader acts as a detective, assembling the fragments of the past to finally uncover what truly happened to Zubaida.

Author: Amira Ghenim (أَمِيرَة غَنِيم)

Born in 1978 in Tunisia, Amira Ghenim is a writer and a professor of Linguistics and Translation at the University of Tunis. Following the publication of numerous academic essays, she released the novel al-Malaff al-Asfar in 2019, which won the Sheikh Rashid bin Hamad Award the following year.

In 2020, she published the novel The House of the Notables (La casa dei notabili), which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and received the Special Jury Prize at the Comar d’Or, Tunisia’s most prestigious literary award.