Wild Mulberries

Iman Humaydan Younes is a Lebanese novelist and freelance journalist. Her first novel Baa Mithl Beit Mithl Beirut (B for Bait for Beirut) received wide international acclaim and was translated into English, French and German. Wild Mulberries is her second novel. Her third novel, Haywat Okhra (Other Lives), will be released in Beirut in 2008 by Al Massar. Many of her short stories appeared in the cultural pages of Lebanese and Arabic newspapers and magazines such as Mulhak An Nahar, As Safir, Al Hasna’a, and Sayidati. Younes studied anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She wrote Neither Here Nor There: Narratives of the Families of the Disappeared in Lebanon and conducted and published studies on environmental and development issues of post-war Lebanon. Michelle Hartman is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Language at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Her main area of research is Modern Arabic Literature, specializing in Lebanese women's writing. She is the translator (with Maher Barakat) of Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib's acclaimed novel Just Like a River.

Wild Mulberries interweaves the coming of age tale of Sarah, a young woman growing up in a small Druze village in the Lebanese Shuf Mountains, and the story of this village itself, especially its role in the production of silk worms. The women who make up the fabric of the village community tend to these silk worms. They are the focus of the book: from Sarah's mother who disappeared when she was a young girl, to her traditionally-minded paternal aunt who longs to be a shaykha, to the spunky Mut'ia from Aleppo, to her Armenian neighbor who longs to go back to her ancestral home. This novel is both a psychological tale of some depth and also a revealing portrayal of the lives of silk-growing villagers in a period of economic depression in Lebanon.