Only the strong survive life’s abuses. 

Much we know of assimilation of folks in alien lore, but the color of versification gathers strange attention when its beats fail to pulsate along the path of its apparent culture; this is the tonal definition of Fossils; a collection of poems from a poet who has since swerved from the milieu that ought to be his begetter. This 68-poem book comes with not just an amorous print quality but content that outshines its sparkles; a range of experimental poems gilded with powerful mastery of a tireless wordsmith infected by the ingenuity of muse that calls itself modernism. The voice in fossils is modeled in lavish tonality that’s almost in dearth among the naturalists, or most suitably, the native Negroid literature.

Recently, an Egyptian businessman called Hisham Talaat Moustafa was sentenced to death in Cairo, found guilty of the murder of a Lebanese pop star and former paramour. Something of a national scandal – Moustafa, a multi millionaire, was a member of the upper house of parliament and close to the family of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak – the reporting was at once engaging, entertaining, and more than a little bit improbable. In this sense, it is a bit like Alaa al Aswany’s Chicago.

Between Morocco and Spain lie the Straits of Gibraltar: 14km across at its narrowest point and at its closest point Africa and Europe are close enough to allow the enterprising tourist a quick jaunt across to the African mainland. In the opposite direction, a different kind of journey is undertaken, under cover of darkness, in flimsy boats piloted by professional smugglers, their cargo desperate individuals who have surrendered themselves to a flimsy, improbable construction of intangibles, the first being the completion of their passage across the straits whilst avoiding capture by the police or much, much worse…

The subjects of the vignettes that form Laila Lalami’s debut novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, are a disparate group, brought together for the first and last time as they undertake the risky journey from Tangiers to Tarifa on the Southern coast of Spain. Faten is pious and deeply religious, with her passive submission to the will of the omnipotent, shaken by setbacks not all of her own making. Murad is an intelligent and charming college graduate who is fluent in English and Spanish but unable to find work other than as an itinerant tour guide to the tourists that have made the trip in reverse, and in infinitely more propitious circumstances. Hatima, with her three small children, is fleeing an alcoholic husband and the unappealing vista of a life without prospects; Aziz leaves his wife and aged mother behind to search for the autonomy that work will afford him, a hope denied in Morocco by his lack of connections and goodwill to rely upon.