Bread and Tea ─ The Story of a Man from Karak

In this post–Arab Spring novel, Ahmad Tarawneh tells the story of conflicting loyalties between two Jordanian brothers, one of whom serves in the Jordanian Armed Forces and the other who belongs to an extremist militant Islamic group and is blinded by the deception and false lure of glory purported by its sheik. With boldness, clarity, and an insider’s eye, Tarawneh addresses the root causes and circumstances that lead a desperate young Jordanian to be recruited into a terrorist organization by a skillful, self-serving sheikh. The novel depicts the positive and negative forces that influence the two brothers in their soul-searching quest of self-actualization that leads to more questions than answers—questions many Arab youth today continue to ask while engulfed in their own raging struggles of tradition, religion, modernity, and secularism. Readers find themselves on an intimate journey into the minds and hearts of the protagonists to witness the tragedy and absurdity of the conflict and the magnitude of the human destruction it leaves behind.

Ahmad Tarawneh is a Jordanian novelist, playwright, and journalist. He served as the vice chair of the Jordanian Writers Society Executive Board and won the Jordanian National Award for his novel Wadi Al-Safsafa in 2009.

Nesreen Akhtarkhavari is an Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Culture and the Director of Arabic Studies at DePaul University, where she teaches Arabic literature, culture, film, media, and translation.
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