Iman Humaydan

Wild Mulberries Iman Humaydan

Sarah is on the brink of adulthood in her village in the mountains of Lebanon in the 1930s, a world itself hesitating on the verge of change. Her father the shaykh is uninterested in anything but the silkworms he's always raised, no matter that each year they're worth less. Her conservative aunt worries only about the family's reputation, fearing that Sarah will take after her mother, who ran away twelve years ago and has been unheard of since. Sarah's brother dreams of going abroad, but each year finds himself still trapped in the family business. Around her the village--Druze and Christian, Lebanese and English--grows poorer, its traditions no longer able to sustain it. Sarah's hopes for the future have come to rely either on marriage, or finding the mother she can't remember.

In Humaydan's textured, lyrical prose, the story of one young woman's coming of age becomes a meditation on a nation's hardship, on home and freedom, hope and loss. Younes brings to intense life this lost world and the women at its center, whose lives have disappeared from history, from their own grasp.