Outside the Box of Dreams

About this book

Behind silence's walls.. tales searching for light. Between the old alley's lanes wafting the smell of the past mixed with patience' perfume, and in the depths of psychiatric clinics where souls are unmasked, Mona Mansour weaves in her work "Outside the Box of Dreams" threads of utmost human complexity. The writer offers us no mere characters, but mirrors reflecting our psychological fractures, our deferred dreams, and those boxes in which we imprisoned ourselves for fear of society's judgments or fleeing fate's disappointments. The novel moves in two parallel spaces; the popular-alley space with all its human din, the mystery of old "Jaber" hiding behind his silence a history of fractures, and "Zeinab's" torment and bitter patience, and the space of the human self embodied by the novel's heroine, the psychologist trying to mend the fragments of others' souls while she herself battles time, loneliness, and the specter of fifty haunting her femininity. This book is no mere chronicle of loss and letdown tales, but an exploratory journey into what lies behind psychological and physical disability, where the lives of people with special needs intersect with the tragedies of the marginalized, creating a "Kafkaesque" painting saturated with hope and will. In a literary style joining delicacy and boldness, Mona Mansour storms the shadow zones of the human psyche, asking: are we truly free in our destinies? Or are we mere lines written in chalk on a road days erase? "Outside the Box of Dreams" is a sincere invitation to smash the walls of numbness, and search for that "green cloud" love once promised us, even if in autumn of life.