Beating Hearts: a collection of short stories

by Rana Alaa

This is the story of twenty-eight beating hearts who live in Cairo, a city that can break and mend your heart on the same day, everyday. Cairenes are knit so closely together creating the fabric of society, yet they lead lives that are worlds apart. There is the girl pressured to get married, the man who lost his children in a tragic train crash, the charming street kid, the Nubian driver, the girl struggling with her hegab, the dreamy hairdresser, the self-indulgent fashionista, the stressed-out tennis player, the struggling surgeon, the single mother, the teenage amputee, the rootless refugee, the fanatic football fan, the frustrated employee, the striving entrepreneur, the dampened activist and more. Within the pages of this book, you will live their struggles, laugh at their dramas and share their tears.

228 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 10, 2020

Reviews

[Salma · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Heba Shaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful first book by a talented young writer. The book is a group of short stories about people we meet in every day life, at home, at work, in the street....everywhere in Cairo, Egypt; from the very poor struggling to earn their day's bare necessities to the elite enjoying all the luxuries money can buy.

I like how the author classified the characters as if they belonged to different chambers of Cairo's heart, from the "damned" in the right atrium, the "tireless" in the right ventricle, the "fortunate" in the left atrium, to the "young" and vivid just as the blood in the left ventricle is pumped to enrich the whole body with oxygen.

The author described these different characters with such deep insight and accuracy that made me feel I can see them move and talk right in front of me!

To gain a wider readership, I strongly recommend to translate the book to Arabic, the language of the people elegantly and passionately described in each story.