ليلة واحدة تكفيLaylah Wahidah Takfi

Longlisted for the 2023 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Arab Booker), «One Night is Enough» by Palestinian-Jordanian writer Qasim Tawfiq (Tawfik).

The events of the novel take place in a café in the Jordanian capital, Amman, on the night of the start of the «Naksa» (Six-Day War), in June 1967. Wijdan, a nurse who works at Amman Hospital, takes refuge in the café at the moment the war breaks out and the sky is filled with smoke. She is forced to remain there to avoid the danger of her journey home, and strikes up a conversation with café employee Dheeb. Although its main events take place within a narrow timeframe and setting in the present day, the novel traces the past lives of the two protagonists across various locations. Dheeb is a young man who was forced into exile before returning to Amman; Wijdan’s family were exiled from Palestine in the 1948 Nakba, and she suffered the painful and tragic loss of her fiancée. The novel delves into the psychology of the two characters, revealing how their connection develops over the course of one night as chaos erupts around them. - (arabicfiction.org)

Qassem Tawfik is a Jordanian writer of Palestinian origins, born in Jenin, Palestine, in 1954. After graduating with a BA in Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Jordan in 1978, he worked in the banking sector in Jordan, the UAE, and several other Arab and European countries. In his final post before retirement, he worked as an auditor in a Jordanian bank. He has published five short story collections and fifteen novels, including: A More Beautiful Land (1987); Al Shindagha (2006); A Story Called Love (2009); Smell of the Bitter Almond (2014); Haemorrhage of the Small Bird (2017), which won the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel in 2018; An Inn Above the Ground (2020); Abdoun Bridge (2021); and One Night Is Enough (2022).