A Woman of Five Seasons

Palestinian Leila al-Atrash is one of the leading novelists and short story writers of the Arab world. She began her career as a journalist and press reporter and, later, as a TV news anchor in Qatar. Her novels include The Sun Rises from the West (1988), An Ordinary Day (1991), Two Nights and the Shadow of a Woman (1997), and The Neighing of Distances (1999), which all probe questions of feminine liberation and selfhood. This is her first novel to be translated into English. Born in Palestine of Lebanese origin, Nora Nweihid Halwani now lives in Beirut. She is a scholar specializing in Arabic literature, author of a collection of short stories, and editor of the feminist magazine Al-Mar’a al-Jadida. Christopher Tingley was born in Brighton, England, and educated at the universities of London and Leeds. He has translated or co-translated many novels, poems, and short stories from the Arabic, among them Yusuf al-Qaid’s novel War in the Land of Egypt and the poetry for the two-volume Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry.