Coverage of The Dissenters
As of April, 2025
Mentions in LitHub, The Millions, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker; excerpts in Triple Canopy, Bidoun, The Dial, and Brittle Paper; conversations in The Master’s Review, The Adroit Journal, and Doek; and reviews in The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The TLS, The Florida Review, Foreword, Bomb, and Arablit. Two US events were recorded here and here; a Writer’s Bone podcast episode is out here.
Dreamy and strange and totally singular
McKayla Coyle, Literary Hub
A vivid portrait of faith, feminism, and contemporary Egypt
KirkSophia M. Stewart, The Millions
[A] powerful, shimmering and clever novel
Kate McLoughlin, The Times Literary Supplement
A work of art unafraid of peeling back the layers of history to find the often ugly and complicated truth beneath. . . . In The Dissenters, Rakha has successfully created a novel that is wholly his own
Alex Ramirez-Amaya
The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lifestyles set them on a collision course with Egypt's military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath
Amitav Gosh
The Dissenters is a powerful literary portrait―part love story, part elegy, part testimony to Egypt’s shifting soul over seven decades. At its center is one woman, Amna Abu Zahra. . . . The novel dissects [her] life with aching intimacy.
Suzie Abdou, Sojourners
July, 2025
My Markaz Review piece on what The Dissenters has meant. A significant conversation with Hilary Plum on the Index for Continuance podcast. Coverage in The New Arab, Qantara.de, Kirkus Reviews, World Literature Today, Sojourners, the Arab Studies Quarterly, Joseph Schreiber's roughghosts.com, Joe Linker's The Coming of the Toads, Unruly, and Summer Farah’s Medium. An Oslo session with Laila Slimani and Soukaina Habiballah available as a podcast.
