Historical literary fiction · Benghazi · Italian fascism · World War II · 2026 · 336 pages
The Woman from Warsaw is a historical novel by Salah el Moncef set in Benghazi under Italian fascism and during the Second World War. Told through Mariam Khaldoon’s retrospective memory, the novel follows a young Libyan girl as colonial spectacle gives way to war, occupation, persecution and exile.
At the center of Mariam’s remembered world is Esther Sanz, a Jewish refugee whose presence changes the way Mariam understands womanhood, courage, cultural difference and the fragile forms of solidarity that survive political violence. Their relationship unfolds within a cosmopolitan North African city increasingly transformed by Fascist racial policy and the military struggle between Axis and Allied forces.
Benghazi, fascism and the North African war
The novel places Benghazi itself at the center of the Second World War rather than treating North Africa as a distant military backdrop. Italian colonial rule, Mussolini’s political theater, the racialization of everyday life, bombing, shifting occupations and the approach of German forces enter the intimate spaces of school, family, neighborhood and friendship.
Mariam’s coming of age is inseparable from this historical pressure. The political world is first apprehended through the heightened perceptions of childhood and adolescence, then reconsidered decades later by a narrator attempting to understand what memory has preserved, altered or concealed.
Mariam Khaldoon and Esther Sanz
Mariam’s friendship with Esther gives the novel its most intimate counterpoint to the machinery of fascism and war. Esther is a Polish-Jewish refugee whose independence, elegance and resilience offer Mariam a model of female possibility outside the conventions surrounding her. Their bond brings Jewish–Arab relations, exile, language, religion and cultural difference into the everyday life of wartime Benghazi.
Rather than separating private experience from historical catastrophe, The Woman from Warsaw follows the way large political forces become visible in gestures, domestic rituals, clothing, food, family secrets, fear and acts of protection.
Memory, exile and historical witness
The novel is structured by retrospective narration. Mariam does not simply recover a lost past; she confronts the instability of remembering it. Childhood perception and adult reflection continually modify one another, making memory both the novel’s archive and one of its central problems.
Across the book, exile is therefore geographical, historical and psychological. A vanished city survives through language while the act of remembering becomes an ethical attempt to preserve people and relationships that war threatened to erase.
The novel expands the world first developed in Salah el Moncef’s earlier historical novella Benghazi, returning to Mariam and the wartime Mediterranean on a larger scale.
Critical reception
Stephen Watt’s essay in Michigan Quarterly Review reads The Woman from Warsaw as an expansion of the imaginative world first developed in Benghazi and emphasizes the novel’s prose, memory work and historical world-building.
BookTrib’s review, “A Lyrical Portrait of War and Survival in WWII Libya,” foregrounds the novel’s treatment of Benghazi under fascism, Mariam’s relationship with Esther, and the experience of living under authoritarian rule and war.
Further reviews, interviews and commentary are collected on the site’s Reviews & Press page.
Publication and authoritative records
The Woman from Warsaw was published in 2026. Independent bibliographic records identify the novel as literary and historical fiction and record a 336-page print edition. The publisher’s presentation is available from Atopon Books, and the book also has a reader and edition record on Goodreads.