No One Asks Your Name
A novel by Belal Jahjooh
Nasir Gharib is a professor of water in Alexandria: late fifties, divorced, admired, and quietly finished with almost everything. He can taste the salinity of the sea outside his window before he has finished his first coffee. For most of his life he has believed that his father, a fisherman from the coast of Palestine, was lost when Nasir was a boy, and that there was nothing left to find.
Then, over a paper cup at a conference, a Norwegian colleague mentions a Palestinian fisherman his family once knew, far above the Arctic Circle.
A small coastal museum holds five logbooks. Four hundred pages of dates, winds, catches and debts, and not a single sentence about a feeling. From them Nasir plots a line across the Mediterranean, and follows it: Beirut and Shatila, Salloum, Sfax, Oran; then Mazara, Marsaxlokk, Sète, Barbate and Grândola; and north into the cold, to Esbjerg, Ålesund, Vardø and Tromsø. In each small port he meets what one man left behind: a debt, a friendship, a meal shared, a door that would not open, and sometimes the sons and daughters of the people who knew him.
No One Asks Your Name is a quiet, traditional novel about fathers and sons, exile and the sea, love that stopped and never restarted, and two men who each mourned the other for a lifetime. It is written for patient readers who like a story that takes its time and stays with them afterwards.
What you get
- The complete novel as a PDF ebook: 288 pages, 43 chapters in five parts
- About 61,000 words, written in British English
- Instant download, readable on any phone, tablet, e-reader or computer
Not sure yet? Download the free preview and read the opening chapters first.
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Also by Belal Jahjooh
- The Wrong Sea — a marriage, from Gaza to Norway and Cairo
- One Lie in Five Cities — a love story through Ramallah, Beirut, Cairo, Rome and Nice
- The Complete Collection — all three novels for $27.99 (save $8.99)
Add any other novel to your cart with this one and get 20% off it automatically.