A Calamity of Noble Houses

Tunisia, 1930s. Against the backdrop of a country in turmoil, in search of its identity, the lives and destinies of the members of two important upper-class families of Tunis intertwine: the Ennaifer family, with a rigidly conservative and patriarchal mentality, and the Rassaa, open-minded and progressive. 

One terrible night in December 1935, the destiny of both families changes forever when Zbaida Ali Rassaa, the young wife of Mohsen Ennaifer, is accused of having had a clandestine love affair with Tahar Haddad, an intellectual of humble origins known for his union activism and support for women’s rights. The events of that fateful night are told by eleven different narrators, members of the two families, who recall them in different historical moments, from the 1940s to the present day. The result is a complex mosaic of secrets, memories, accusations, regrets, and emotions, taking the reader on an exciting journey through the stories of individuals caught up in the upheavals of history.  

Amira Ghenim is a Tunisian writer and academic, born in 1978. She teaches Linguistics and Translation at Tunis University.  Her novel The Yellow Dossier won the 2020 Sheikh Rashid Bin Hamad Prize. A Calamity of Noble Houses was published in 2020. 

Miled Faiza is a Tunisian-American poet and translator. He is the author of Baqāya l-bayt allaḏī daḵalnāhu marratan wāḥida (2004) and Asabaʕ an-naḥḥāt (2019) and translator of the Booker Prize–shortlisted novel Autumn (al-Kharif, 2017), as well as Winter (al-Shitā’, 2019) and Spring (ar-Rabiʕ, 2023), all by Ali Smith.

Karen McNeil translated A Calamity of Noble Houses (in press) and The Italian (2021), both with Miled Faiza, as well as poems and short stories for Banipal and World Literature Today. She was a revising editor of the Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014). She has a PhD in Arabic linguistics from Georgetown University (2023) and works as a specialist in large language models and artificial intelligence.