Books
Fiction by Salah el Moncef moves through North Africa, Europe, and the diasporic imagination. Across novels, novellas, and stories, memory becomes both an archive and an ordeal: private lives unfold inside fascism, exile, migration, and historical rupture.
Set in Benghazi under Italian fascism and during the Second World War, The Woman from Warsaw follows Mariam Khaldoon as she returns, decades later, to the memories that formed her. At once a historical novel and an intimate record of a vanished cosmopolitan city, it traces friendship, family loyalty, Jewish–Arab relations, colonial violence, and the afterlife of exile.
Stephen Watt’s essay in Michigan Quarterly Review situates the novel as the larger imaginative world promised by the earlier novella Benghazi.
Other Books
These works trace the earlier formation of a literary world shaped by memory, displacement, colonial history, and the unstable experience of belonging.
Tariq Abbassi, a Tunisian diasporic poet and restaurateur, attempts to reconstruct his memory after a catastrophic accident. Moving between Tunisia, Paris, and Brittany, the novel turns psychological suspense into a meditation on guilt, grief, migration, and the stories through which a damaged self tries to become legible.
A gathering of fiction and critical reflection: Benghazi, The Night Visitor, A Bridge Too Near, and The Voice of Exile. The volume moves between the remembered streets of colonial Benghazi, Brittany, and the cultural crossings of exile.
A novella of memory and historical rupture. From her later life in the American Midwest, Mariam Khaldoon returns to Benghazi in the late 1930s, when Mussolini’s colonial spectacle, family secrets, and the intensifying menace of fascism begin to alter everything.
First published in Short Story, volume 19, issue 1, this work marks an early stage in Salah el Moncef’s fiction. The original bibliographic record and publication details are preserved by UNI ScholarWorks.
Continue with the critical reception
Explore major reviews, essays, interviews, commentaries, and carefully selected responses to the books.