Creating Rachel

by Mustafa Alwawi

In Creating Rachel, Mohammed goes to any and all lengths, racking up thousands of pounds of credit card debt to finance the increasingly desperate moves he believes will tip Rachel's heart in his favour. All the while wrestling with his jealousy, confusion, pain, longing and inner awakening. Here, in his first novel, Mustafa Alrawi paints a perfect picture of the over-privileged, twenty-something Arab living in London at the turn of the twenty-first century - a man who refuses to face the truth that his carefully constructed fantasy world is dying amid the inevitable changes that are about to happen post-9-11.

120 pages, Paperback

First published September 14, 2012

Reviews

[David Hebblethwaite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mustafa Alrawi’s short debut novel is narrated by Mohammed, a young man who’s mostly been drifting through life, buoyed up by his privileged background. But, just over a year ago, he met and fell in love with a girl named Rachel – though he still doesn’t seem certain whether his love was ever reciprocated; now, Mohammed looks back over that time, and how knowing Rachel has shaped the person he is now.

Creating Rachel is firmly embedded in Mohammed’s subjectivity – almost too much so, as the reader’s sense of how the protagonist’s actions and attitudes may appear from the outside can be diluted. But an effective uncertainty also comes off the page – uncertainty over how much happened in reality, and how Mohammed really feels about Rachel. He builds an idea (or several) of her in his mind, and we see how doing that changes him; as much as Mohammed might be said to be ‘creating Rachel’, he’s also creating himself.

[Neha Mahamood]

dnf at page 20