Time Stopped Here

About this book

In Abdel-Hamid Al-Qaed's worlds, time does not pass as we know it; it piles in corners, naps over "Ferej Al-Fadhel's" pavements, and bathes in the sea waves carrying the secrets of returners and absentees. "Time Stopped Here" is no mere short-story collection, but a journey recovering lost memory between Manama's ports and Shatt Al-Arab's banks, and between Cairo's streets inhabited by old love's ghosts. The book's texts weave delicate threads of human mystery; between a hero escaping reality's cruelty to find himself at sea heading toward the unknown, and another chasing the echo of a love story in a Cairene flat seemingly outside time's domain, Al-Qaed's ability to seize fleeting moments manifests. The tales here do not narrate the past as elapsed time, but as a living being haunting us, appearing in a departed friend's phone ring a year ago, or in a stranger's features carrying his grandfather's revenge in his eyes. With a composed literary tone and excessive poeticism, the writer takes us to the human psyche's shadow zones, where.