Shackles and Wings

About this book

There is a voice coming from the depths of the cave, an ancient, deep voice that breaks the monotony and noise of the world, carrying the stillness of the inner self and the wisdom of the ancients. Toward it rushes Hamed, burdened with all the suffocating shackles life has woven: the weight of family, the temptations of society, a disgrace seeking to smother a honor reduced to a Chinese hymen, and a young spirit withering under the whips of unemployment and barren reality. He runs not to escape the world, but to escape his own helpless self, to throw the burdens of the years at the threshold of his venerable sheikh. But this book is not merely a disciple's journey to his master; it is a complex spiritual map where paths intertwine and memory blends with feeling. In another corner of the world stands the old general Ivan Goebbels, in his military uniform heavy with medals and loneliness, facing his greatest enemies: the memory of the war, which left him no one to celebrate victory with except the gravestone of his beloved Clara. It is the final search for meaning, for a homeland, for a human being. And the trilogy of pain is completed with the story of a child who found nothing but a drawing notebook as his weapon, selling his paintings on the sidewalk to return to his illness-stricken mother a part of life. Shackles and Wings is less a story collection than a deep human elegy, written in enchanting poetic language that plunges you into magical worlds. It is a bitter question about the price of immortality, the meaning of love, and the space of forgiveness in a heart wide enough for sins and stars alike. Mostafa Younes opens his pages so you may learn that the greatest wings grow only from beneath the heaviest shackles, and that your only salvation begins where you thought was the end.