The Other Rooms

In The Other Rooms, acclaimed Palestinian-Iraqi writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra crafts a haunting modernist tale set in an unnamed city where nothing is what it seems. When an unnamed man is whisked from an empty city square into a nightmarish compound, he is plunged into a world of shadowy rooms, shifting identities, erotic entanglements, and elusive truths. As he is forced to lecture on a book he never wrote and assume names he doesn't recognize, the boundaries between reality and illusion collapse. Written during the darkest years of Iraq's authoritarian era, The Other Rooms is a gripping allegory of state surveillance, intellectual repression, and the psychological toll of life under tyranny. With echoes of Kafka and Beckett, this is Jabra at his most experimental and unflinching-a visionary work of Arabic modernism that resonates powerfully today.