OUR FAVOURITE SECOND-HAND FINDS

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, 1989

Located deep within the shelves of a ramshackle book store in the Moroccan capital of Rabat, I came across Hijuelos’s Pultizer

prize winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of

Love. The novel follows Cesar Castillo, as he spends his final hours in an abandoned hotel recalling the highs and lows of his former career as a successful Mambo singer. Like the music that courses through the pages, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is vibrant,

passionate and tragic.

Saeed Saeed

Burmese Days by George Orwell, 1934

Set in Burma (now Myanmar) during the final years of British colonialism, Orwell’s first novel is not his finest – far from it – but it is nevertheless worth reading for the unreconstructed fury that burns through every page. John Flory is an expat, who has become disillusioned by life in the jungle and is appalled by the behaviour of his racist companions at the European Club. I picked up a copy of this at a market while on holiday in Myanmar and was captivated by Orwell’s descriptions of long, stiflingly hot days spent far away from home.

Rupert Hawksley

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, 2002

This is probably my favourite book of all time, and I just happened to stumble across it in one of those swap libraries you find in many hotels. I’m sure I left a far inferior book behind – probably something chick lit-adjacent. I devoured every already-worn page of Al Aswany’s study of the inhabitants of one 10-storey building in Cairo in less than a day (something I rarely manage to do these days). The social commentary is piercing, the storytelling lingering.

Nyree McFarlane

Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward Said, 1999

This is the book that introduced me to the great Palestinian American thinker Edward Said, the best Arab intellectual of his generation who passed away in 2003. It’s a beautifully written story about his journey as he moved from his birthplace in the city of Jerusalem, to Cairo, and Lebanon and eventually the United States where he settled and became an American citizen. It’s a book that is very rich in detail and profoundly moving. I highly recommend it.

Samia Badih

Red Brotherhood at War, by Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley, 1984

It was on a weeklong road-trip to Manchester’s City’s historic 1999 second division play-off final victory against Gillingham beneath Wembley’s hallowed arches that I stopped off in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon and found this gem of a historical tome in a charity shop. We don’t learn much about Asian history in British schools, beyond the fact that we colonised most of it, and even less if the dreaded “communism” is involved, and this book opened my eyes to some fascinating facts from the period following that awkward defeat for the US’ military might in the region.

Christopher Newbould