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“Keket showed the woman the flyer and began explaining their plight, and within minutes she wanted to sign up too, and said, “Things are getting worse, before we had no respect from the pharaohs, but now it’s even less.” Femi stood at her side like a ...more
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Daniel O'Reilly rated a book it was amazing The Last Summer of Mr. Dipodoidea by غادة كمال	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
"On the seventh night of her confinement, the father was yelling at his wife, claiming that there was a foul smell in the house and that it was because of their daughter’s wicked thoughts. He insisted she burn some incense and stormed out. But no one ...more
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“Keket showed the woman the flyer and began explaining their plight, and within minutes she wanted to sign up too, and said, “Things are getting worse, before we had no respect from the pharaohs, but now it’s even less.”
Femi stood at her side like a “Keket showed the woman the flyer and began explaining their plight, and within minutes she wanted to sign up too, and said, “Things are getting worse, before we had no respect from the pharaohs, but now it’s even less.”
Femi stood at her side like an arrow, straight and tall, she wanted to give the impression that they were to be trusted. The woman promised to pass on the word to her family, friends, and work colleagues.
Keket said, “The pharaohs can’t be allowed to get away with this anymore.”
“We work at a small flower stall in the centre. We are completely reliant on business from the pharaohs, but we hate it and would much rather be free of their dominant ways. Every day they come in, then walk straight back out again without paying for the flowers, or they promise that some small favour will be paid on the other side, but who’s to believe that nonsense! Just because they are lords with all their wealth and riches, it’s like they feel they can command us still from the grave.”
She hooted with laughter, half with fear. “Imagine that!” she said, with a terrified giggle.
Femi was quaking, but Keket was a lot more solid in her beliefs. She knew what powers they had but saw the battle they would ensue with one another being in this world, not the next, and with that, they departed from Huda and went on to continue their campaigning for a better life for women in this world, not the next.”

Nicholas Vaughan, from ‘The Unwrapping’, Published by, 2025

Nicholas Vaughan is an ethical writer - ethical in the sense that his values stand front and centre in his work. That said, his central device of reanimating an ancient Egyptian king and allowing him to navigate the pandemic landscape of 2020’s London provides Vaughan with an elegant distance from which to make his central critique: that of elites.

The above quote can’t help but feel untimely. Who hasn’t speculated on the quasi-spectral powers of the elite, or felt the pangs of injustice at seeing a tiny group of demigods live in a luxury built at the expense of the whole polity? Vaughan’s satire begins however at a familiar, but humorous, cultural locus: ‘The Curse of the Mummy’, (which one could fairly liken to the Conservative ‘zombie governments’ of Theresa May, Boris Johnson & Liz Truss,) and who governed in the controversial post-Brexit environment, which rapidly became the COVID-19 pandemic.

Death is therefore a salient theme of the novel. Many people were touched by death during this period. Yet the pandemic presented exclusive opportunities to elites that were in turn exploited for gain. Control of the narrative was paramount. Governments tried to falsify the numbers of the dead to ‘manage’ the populace. Others suggested, (including Boris Johnson,) that a neo-fascist ‘survival of the fittest’ situation was desirable, contrary to all the advice from experts, whom the Brits had already been taught to distrust since Brexit. Elites visibly flouted the pandemic safety rules, and propelled conspiracies into the public realm to muddy the waters at the jeopardy of all. We watched it on social media.

Despite the subject matter, this book is littered with humour, and Vaughn's wry wit permeates every page. Coupled with deft perceptions and descriptions, the story unfolds at a delightful pace. I would thoroughly recommend this book!

About the author:
Nicholas Vaughan’s short fiction has appeared in Northern Life Magazine and Pen to Print, where four stories have been featured: "Legend of the White Hanky," "A Life Changing Revelation," "Fantasy Beast of Evolution," and "A Trade-Off For A Forgotten Fact." Nicholas is currently developing his first short story collection, with fifteen completed pieces. Beyond his forthcoming debut novel The Unwrapping, Nicholas has independently published one novella. He’s also working on two climate fiction novels which will be published by Provoco, as well as one that explores his Mauritian heritage. He has produced a handmade artist's book, Matchbox Brothers, which is held in the permanent collection of the British Library. Nicholas's literary criticism includes a published critique of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, available on Compulsive Reader. ...more

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The Last Summer of Mr. Dipodoidea
by غادة كمال

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"On the seventh night of her confinement, the father was yelling at his wife, claiming that there was a foul smell in the house and that it was because of their daughter’s wicked thoughts. He insisted she burn some incense and stormed out. But no one "On the seventh night of her confinement, the father was yelling at his wife, claiming that there was a foul smell in the house and that it was because of their daughter’s wicked thoughts. He insisted she burn some incense and stormed out. But no one else could smell anything. The mother’s heart pounded as she rushed to clean the house and prepare dinner. When her husband didn’t return, she went to bed.

“At dawn, the villagers gathered outside their house. The mother went outside, panic-stricken. They told her they had found her husband dead, his chest ripped open. A young man claimed to have seen a man wearing a mask with a frog on his head, dragging a long tail behind him, emerging from the canal. No one believed him, as he was known to exaggerate stories. The village doctor concluded that it must have been a gang of organ traffickers and that they were all in danger…”

Ghadah Kamal Ahmed, from ‘The Last Summer of Mr Dipodoidea’, Sulfur Editions 2024

‘The Last Summer of Mr. Dipodoidea’ is the debut book by Egyptian author Dr. Ghadah Kamal Ahmed. The book consists of five stories respectively entitled ‘The Last Summer of Mr. Dipodoidea’, ‘THE PHANTOM OF MELATONIN CITY’, ‘Tangerine’s Memory’, ‘The First Pages of Attis’, and ‘The man who ate the watch’. My review will consist in an exploration of themes, and will not discuss any elements of plot, or any kind of summary: this book resists any such inclination to summarise.

Kamal’s world of Cairo is deftly translated through any number of devices, ranging from the appearance of Egyptian deities and folkloric characters, to intimate descriptions of places and the people who occupy them, with every description both rich without excess, and precise. There is a decided elegance about Kamal’s prose - elegance in the mathematical sense - but the reader must step through the portal and surrender to the world she has created, embrace its logic and characters, and its refusal to be any of these things. This is a book about libidinal forces, powerful forces which submit to no institution or authority, but exist to create - in a Dionysian sense, being torn apart to be made whole, and all in triumphant ecstasy. This is unquestionably a Surrealist’s book, and brings to mind ‘The Story of the Eye’ by Georges Bataille, with its dual emphases on eroticism and transgression. Kamal’s world, though it may appear strange and unlikely, is however so rooted in concrete reality that she has made it exist through her capacity for observation and depth of feeling, alongside her sheer inventiveness and the confidence it gives her prose.

A salient theme of this book is a relation to the animal world through metamorphosis. Mr. Dipodoidea himself is a kind of desert-dwelling marsupial with long ears. Characters change their form, and one can’t help but see the Egyptian gods of antiquity, and their hybrid state between human and animal, as a double-image throughout the book. The earliest sculpture we know of is of a lion-man hybrid carved from ivory about 40,000 years ago, and found in Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany. Becoming-animal, for humans, is one of the oldest and strongest roots of our identity. In Kamal’s book, that is no less apparent in the figure of Lorca - Kamal’s recently deceased dog, who appears in the book in different forms, and about which her most painful passages are penned.

The central motif of the book however must be that of freedom. An all-consuming freedom of the creative imagination, complete with stinging barbs for those in power who suppress freedom. The image of the dictator Keramboz, leader of the ‘Bat State’ who works to crush the licentious rebellion of the ‘Melatonin Phantom Group’ - a nod to Kamal’s own group of Surrealists - clearly leads us to think of the terrible events of the Arab Spring which swept through Cairo in 2010, and which form a psychological locus-point for the novel, driven by the twin engines of the erotic and of transgression.

About Ghadah Kamal Ahmed
Ghadah Kamal Ahmed is a surrealist visual artist, writer, and poet. She is a founding member of the Middle East and North Africa Surrealist Group and the Chrysopoeia surrealist union. She has also served as a coordinator for performances, workshops, and cinema screenings for surrealist exhibitions. Her work, which includes poems and collages, has been published in books such as "Wolves of the Moon," co-authored with Mohsen Elbelasy, and "Beyond Things." She is also an editor for the Surrealist Cities section of Room surrealist magazine and an editor at Sulfur Surrealist Jungle. She has contributed lyrics and voice to the film "Surrealist Poetry Night" (2022). She is based in Egypt and her work explores themes related to the subconscious, society, and the breaking of reality's boundaries. She has stated that surrealism helped her find freedom of expression in her art. ...more

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