The Bookseller's Notebooks

Winner of the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction—known as the "Arabic Booker Prize"— this novel explores themes of loneliness, homelessness, and mental illness.

After losing his job and refuge, Ibrahim al-Warraq, a bookseller, decides to live with the homeless people in his city and assuming the identities of the heroes of the novels he has read.Set between 1947 and 2019, this novel is based on several notebooks of stories about people facing different hardships, such as losing their homes or not knowing who their families are. Their interwoven destinies reveal the value of the house, as a symbol of one’s homeland, as opposed to the surrounding ruination. The central character is Ibrahim the bookseller, a cultured man, and voracious reader of novels who takes on the identity of the protagonists in novels which appeal to him. He becomes a professional thief who robs banks and the very wealthy in order to help the abject poor and impose his own form of justice like Robin Hood. But due to his isolation, loneliness, and maltreatment by a cruel world, he suffers mental illness and descends into full schizophrenia. He attempts suicide, before meeting a mysterious woman who will change his life.

Jalal Barjasis a Jordanian literary author and journalist, writing in Arabic. A trained engineer, he worked as a newspaper editor and a journalist and has published in a range of genres, including poetry, short stories, novels, and literary articles.

Location: Lower level C-1