Baytuna al-Kabirبيتنا الكبير

Longlisted for the 2023 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Arab Booker)«The Family House», a novel in the Arabic language by Moroccan novelist Rabia Raihane (Rayhan).
The novel is set in Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century. Farida relates memories of her childhood and growing up in ‘the family house’ built by her grandfather Kabour, a strong, brave and chivalrous man who fled his village after a physical altercation with a local official who had attacked a farmer. In his new abode on the banks of the Tensift River, near the city of Safi, Kabour establishes himself as a patriarch. He marries four women to give him innumerable children to work for him. He becomes a successful businessman and a local legend. Farida meanwhile is forced to leave her mother as a young child after her parents’ divorce and move to the family house, where she shares in the life of the different generations living there. Reaching the age of forty, she decides to enroll at film school and write a screenplay about the life of her extraordinary and complex grandfather. (arabicfiction.org)

About the author
Rabia Raihane is a Moroccan novelist and short story writer, born in Morocco in 1951. She is the head of the Moroccan Forum for Culture and the Arts, and the founder of the Safi Festival of Female Creativity. For two years, she was head of the Moroccan Writers’ Union. She has published eight short story collections, one of which, Women’s Rain (1999), won the Female Creativity Prize in the UAE. In addition to The Family House (2022), she has published two earlier novels, Ways of Loving (2013) and Aunt Um Hani (2020)