Goat Mountain

In Goat Mountain, Habib Selmi’s first novel, published in Arabic in 1988, a young man’s journey begins in a dilapidated old bus that takes four hours to reach Al-‘Ala, from where he takes a long ride on mule back, accompanied by a mysterious older man who is to play an important part in the young man’s new life as a teacher. They finally arrive at Goat Mountain, a forlorn and dusty Tunisian desert village. The school is a single room. The youth passes the first night in the house of his uncommunicative guide, whose name is Ismail . . . He grows more uneasy and depressed as Ismail becomes ever more powerful until, with a new truck and his own private army, Ismail dominates village life and casts a menacing shadow over the young man.

Charis Olszok is a Lecturer in Modern Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a translator of modern Arabic fiction. Habib Selmi was born in 1951 in Al-‘Ala, near the city of Kairouan in Tunisia, and since 1981 has lived in Paris, France. His writing career started with short stories, but by the time of his second collection in 1986, he had already started on a new experience . . . that of writing a novel, this one translated into English, Goat Mountain. It was published in Beirut in 1988. Selmi is now a critically acclaimed author, with eleven further novels, his latest, Longing for the Woman Next Door, (May 2020) shortlisted for the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.