When the imam of a small town in Southern Lebanon is diagnosed with cancer, the illness he fears and has expected for years, he takes the radical decision to abandon the life he inherited from his father. He was persuaded to wear the robe and turban in his youth to preserve the family tradition and entered into an arranged marriage. While his grandfather and father were once powerful imams, he displays no interest in the mosque. The wife, for whom he feels no affection, attends to her chores and nurses his father, now sick and bedridden, in his house. Though he worries about his two sons, who were born deaf and mute, he takes no measures to secure a special education for them.
Hassan Daoud, born in Beirut in 1950, holds a master's degree in Arabic literature and has taught creative writing at the Lebanese American University. He is the editorial director of al-Mudun news website and is on the editorial board of the quarterly magazine Kalamon. He is the author of three short story collections and ten novels. No Road to Paradise was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2015.
Marilyn Booth has translated works by Hoda Barakat, Latifa al-Zayyat, Nawal El Saadawi, and many other Arab writers, and is the translator of Hassan Daoud's The Penguin's Song. She is Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University.In a small Lebanese village a disillusioned imam, diagnosed with terminal cancer, must face his demons. Having consented to an arranged marriage, he has found himself in a loveless union and lusts after another. To please his family, he took up the robe and turban of his forefathers but the expected path to fulfillment did not unfold before him. Meticulous, sparse prose quietly evokes the essence of rural life and the burden of tradition. Hassan Daoud's masterful novel plumbs the depths of a man's struggle with religion and his place in the world.
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