Huna

In 2013, Abdelrahman ElGendy was seventeen and an eager student activist in Cairo. The hopes raised by the January 25 revolution had faded, and after the military coup that summer, security forces killed protesters in massacres on an unprecedented scale. He chose to join the street movement anyway. His father, worried for his safety, went with him to a large demonstration. Within minutes of arriving, the two were caught in a violent police crackdown and arrested, and the life they knew ended. Packed into a holding cell, Abdelrahman heard the protest song "Sawfa Nabqa Huna," or "We Will Remain Here," a song that has long endured across the Arab world. It left him with a question. If nobody wanted to stay behind bars, then what was the "here" the song's singers had chosen to inhabit? He spent the following six years as a political prisoner trying to answer it. He and his father were moved from jail cell to pre-trial detention center and finally to the Scorpion, Egypt's most notorious prison complex. As incarceration wore down his body with no release date in sight, he fell back on the one refuge he still had: reading and writing. He completed a bachelor's degree in engineering while inside, read widely, and used his writing to bear witness to what he saw. Huna is his debut, and it offers a challenge instead of comfort. When tenderness, family, friendship and language can all be turned against you, how do you find the courage to love? The book is a reckoning with what it takes, and what it costs, to stay put when you are being erased, and with what lasts, perhaps more faithfully, once hope is gone. It was longlisted for the National Book Award.