Book: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine.  Click here to search the catalog for this book.

Monthly book club meetings are held at 6:30 pm on the last Wednesday of the month unless otherwise noted.  Meet us in the Upstairs Conference Room or on Zoom (register for the link). New members are always welcome!

Led by Susan Tacent and funded through the generosity of the Friends of the Rogers Free Library.

Synopsis: 

Rabih Alameddine follows his bestseller, The Hakawati, with a heartrending novel that celebrates the singular life of an obsessive introvert, revealing Beirut’s beauties and horrors along the way.

Aaliya Saleh lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family’s  “unnecessary appendage.” Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read—by anyone. After overhearing her neighbors, “the three witches,” discussing her too-white hair, Aaliya accidentally dyes her hair too blue.

In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman’s late-life crisis, readers follow Aaliya’s digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut. Colorful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya’s own volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.

A love letter to literature and its power to define who we are, Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of one woman’s life in the Middle East.