Search results for ""author taleb alrefai""

Impoverished Egyptian teacher Helmy is desperate to find a better life for himself, his wife and little boy, seeing no future at home in Cairo. He dreams of working in oil-rich Kuwait and its boom in construction being the answer, just like many thousands before him. He manages to borrow the huge cost of a visa and is at last on his way to Kuwait City. He has no idea of the hellish nightmare, instead of the dream, that awaits him – the relentless summer sun and temperature of 56ºC and more, the choking dust and sweat, having to do construction work instead of teaching. And always, no money, and no answers from the many officials that he comes up against. Instead of achieving his dream, he falls into trap after trap. The author is himself a character in the novel, an engineer with the construction company who is writing a novel about the humiliating and degrading experiences of the migrant foreign workers arriving in Kuwait to make their fortunes. In the Preface to the novel, author Taleb Alrefai writes: "The novel casts lights on the lives of thousands of workers who come to the Gulf states with dreams of money and wealth, but who are confronted with the harshness of a desolate reality. It exposes specifically the suffering of migrant workers in Kuwait, be they Arabs or foreigners, and how their every moment is shaped by need, injustice and cruelty. Some commit suicide, but that has no effect on the work on site under the blazing sun that’s like the lash of hell. "Almost a historical document on my life and the lives of the workers with whom I lived for fifteen years, Shadow of the Sun presents a human landscape set in and reflecting Kuwait."

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Taleb Alrefai turns a spotlight on Kuwait’s pearl-fishing history in this enthralling fictional re-telling of that fateful day, 19 February 1979, when the country’s famous dhow shipmaster Captain Al-Najdi is lost at sea in a treacherous storm. In between fishing for seabream with two friends, the retired mariner looks back on how the sea has been calling him since childhood, on the punishing work of pearl-divers, and how he became a captain at 14. As he recalls his voyages around the Arabian Peninsula, some with renowned Australian sailor Alan Villiers, he meditates on how the sea was abandoned when pearl-fishing ended with the discovery of synthetic pearls and oil. In a kind of revenge, howling winds and enormous black waves suddenly erupt and quickly engulf the small fishing boat.

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