Suhaila lies in a coma in a Paris hospital. Her son Nadir flies in from Canada, and friends keep vigil. As she lies voiceless and suspended between life and death we, like Nadir, come to discover her through the multiple narratives that hover around her sickbed: fragments of conversations, memories, and letters, all (re)membered, first by Nadir, and then through Suhaila's diary entries in Paris and in Canada. The loved ones of the title are the constellation of friends, predominantly women, who flock to Suhaila's side from all over the world to envelope her in the warmth of friendship that may ultimately save her and enable her rebirth. Suhaila comes alive through the stories about her: her excesses, her love of dancing, of wine, and of poetry, despite years of abuse by her Iraqi husband, the bleakness of exile from home, and the frustrating separation from her only son. The Loved Ones is an intimately moving, polyphonic narrative of displacement and nomadism, a disjointed, at times disfigured tale that blends diverse time frames so that the past, the present, and the future are unified, interlocked, and intertwined. This award-winning novel is a hymn to friendship and to boundless giving that ultimately restores life - it is a story about memory and history, a story against forgetting.

Alia Mamdouh (Author)
ALIA MAMDOUH was born in Iraq and received her degree in psychology from the University of Mastansariya in 1971. She served as editor-in-chief of al-Rasid magazine from 1970 to 1982. She now lives in Paris. She is the author of Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad (AUC Press, 2005).
Marilyn Booth (Translated by)
Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English. Her translations of Omani author Jokha Alharthi include Bitter Orange Tree and Celestial Bodies, which was awarded the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Hoda Barakat, Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Nawal al-Saadawi. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women's writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.