Stoning the Devil – Garry Craig Powell
Stoning The Devil – Garry Craig Powell
Stoning the Devil, was released this week by Skylight Press. The talented author, Garry Craig Powell, will pull you in with the unique setting and characters, and then he’ll keep you there to hear the full, compelling story. You will come away with a clear picture of the complexities both men and women face in the United Arab Emirates. But more than that, you will understand more about the darkness and the light of human nature. Perhaps, you will better understand yourself.
Come back for my next post, an interview with the author. For more info, and accounts of his own experiences living in the United Arab Emirates, visit Garry’s blog.
Buy your digital or paper copy on Amazon today! Stoning The Devil.
Stoning the Devil is a novel-in-stories set in the United Arab Emirates, a country of paradoxes, of seediness and glamour, of desert grandeur and Disneyland vulgarity, where public executions and other barbaric customs are winked at by the western expats who run the economy. Colin, a professor of literature, is not the ‘typical’ expat, ignorant and interested only in pleasure and his stock portfolio, but a speaker of Arabic and an admirer of Arab culture – or is he? To his Arab wife, he is an Orientalist who exoticizes and patronises the locals, unaware of his latent racism. Powell presents a complex and contradictory set of Arab characters, who are a far cry from fundamentalist stereotypes. He also gives women in the Gulf a voice – as none are completely submissive.
This powerful novel-in-stories is probably the first work of literary fiction set in the Persian Gulf by a westerner since Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. It echoes all the concerns of the great Arab writers, Mahfouz, Munif, and Kanafani, regarding the post-colonial world. Written by an author who spent eight years in that part of the world, the Gulf is presented as a crucible in which people of different races and religions are forging a new humanity, in spite of the abysses between them.
