“Empty Cages is a beautiful, lingering novel. Fatma’s own approach to her story seems like a dare to challenge her detachment. At every turn, she downplays her defiance of cultural taboos. She smokes, drinks, rejects marriage as destiny, and pursues poetry—not in rebellion, but in quiet insistence on her own path.” —Foreword Reviews

"Empty Cages is beautiful and daring. In rich prose, we catch sight of poignant truths, which encompass both hope and disappointment, the weakness of human character and the struggle to resist it, and the pain and pleasure of discovery."—Hussein Hammouda, Cairo University

"Fatma Qandil has successfully created a novel of the self. All her memories are transformed into idols, which she then destroys. She stays there, sweeping up the dusty remains of those idols, even though she may be one herself."—Thaer Deeb, Deputy Director of the Translation Unit at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies

"Fatma Qandil's language is sly. Whenever we catch hold of a thread, we discover it only exists in our imagination. Her genre-mixing, redrawing boundaries or erasing them entirely, is itself an act of freedom"—Shereen Abouelnaga, Cairo University

"An unflinchingly honest portrayal of the relationships of violence that lie beneath the surface of an ordinary, middle-class Egyptian family."—Dina Heshmat, American University in Cairo

★Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Empty Cages is an urgent and raw confessional of memory and family and all that is lost and won in one woman's lifetime
★WOMEN’S FICTION: Recent winners of the Naguib Mahfouz prize by women have been embraced by the Indies including Omaima Al-Khamis’ The Book Smuggler (Hoopoe, 2021). Empty Cages also has echoes of Huzama Habayeb’s, Velvet with it’s poetic voice of a woman’s suffering and resilience at the hands of her family.
★AKIN TO WOMEN’S CLASSICS: Consuming and confessional, this book has echoes of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic, The Yellow Wallpaper. Qandil’s is a unique voice, capturing an unforgettable point of view.
★AWARD-WINNING TRANSLATOR: Adam Talib’s translation with Katharine Halls of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace (Abrams, 2018) was awarded the Sheikh Hamad Award.

The discovery of an old tin of chocolates, its contents long ago devoured, marks the entry into this intimate story that reaches back through a lifetime of memories in search of self and home, with the relationship between mother and daughter at its core.

Fatma Qandil describes, in startling and immersive prose, growing up in a middle-class Egyptian family, the youngest child and witness to their declining fortunes. Spanning the 1960s to the present day, her happy childhood melts away to reveal the fecklessness of her selfish older brothers, her father’s addiction, her mother’s illness, and the violence and many deaths, both literal and figurative, that she endures.

In both celebration and suffering, and through triumph and disappointment, her voice is unflinching, revealing both a determination to speak the truth and a poetic sensitivity that is disarming. Recipient of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, this fictional debut marks the arrival of a stunning new voice.

Fatma Qandil (Author) is an Egyptian author, poet, playwright, and translator. She is associate professor (emerita) in the Department of Arabic at Helwan University in Cairo and deputy editor-in-chief of Fusul, a magazine of literary criticism. She has published numerous collections of poetry, works of literary criticism, and translations into Arabic, and her nonfiction has been translated into many languages. Empty Cages is her first novel and first book to be available in English. She currently lives in Cairo, Egypt.