Doha: A novel by the novelist and the academic Dr. Hanan Al Fayyad, faculty member at Qatar University, titled The Land of Storytellers was recently released.
Published by Arab Institute for Research and Publishing in Beirut, the 344-page novel raises several problems from the Arab social reality, such as Social stratification and the multiple restrictions of social life such as fear of people’s gossip, and the fear of envy, which are inherited by the Arab mind to form a social and cultural legacy.
In a statement to Qatar News Agency (QNA), Dr. Hanan Al Fayyad said that the novel raises many social issues in our Arab world by imagining life seventy years later for a group of Arabs who left their country and wanted to settle on an island on the outskirts of South Asia, to establish their state on it, then this land develops in science, urbanization, and technology, while its people who work in the profession of “storytellers” remain prisoners of their social legacy that restricts their human relations.
She added that the novel attempts to explore the depths of multiple types of characters, where the characters are varied and dominated by women - it includes the dreamy woman, the fierce woman, the naive and arrogant woman, each of them expresses her vision of the relationship with the man through a narrative that tells various stories for each of them. All of this comes within the general framework of the novel, which focuses on the impact of social restrictions on women’s lives.
