Kingdom of Strangers

Elias Khoury’s The Kingdom of Strangers (1996, Mamlakah al-Ghuraba 1993) is a slim book which interweaves the reflections of the narrator (identified with Khoury himself), the folk legend of the Lebanese monk Jurji Khairy, and the story of the  "Circassian" Widad.  These stories are retold by a narrator to us, and to two interlocutors, with …