For Sara M. Saleh, the best first line in fiction is also one of the most famous, and can be found in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. In a way it feels fitting that the human rights lawyer, poet and author would choose this – her debut novel, Songs for the Dead and the Living offers its own vivid portrait of family life, told across three generations and set against the backdrop of war-torn Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and Australia.
Barely months after her fiction debut, Saleh has also published her first poetry collection The Flirtation of Girls. Like Songs for the Dead and the Living, it's a timely, essential read. The book negotiates this same context – the occupation of ancestral homelands, migration, colonial and patriarchal violence – with an intimate voice and clear-eyed conviction. The poems sing with the prismatic joys and complexities of what it is to be an Arab-Australian Muslim woman. To celebrate the release of The Flirtation of Girls, Saleh shares her literary favourites for RUSSH Book Club. Find them, below.
The last book I read is…
Isabelle Hammad’s Enter Ghost and Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah.
I am currently reading …
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. I'm also rereading Minor Detail by Adania Shibli.
The book that made me fall in love with reading is...
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad made me fall back in love with reading.
The book that made me want to be a poet is…
Anything by Warsan Shire and the poetry sung by Fairouz, written by the Rahbani brothers and Sayed Darwish.
The best opening line of a book is...
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Taken from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
The character I most identify with is…
A mix of Elinor Dashwood and Hermione (I am sorry to say).
My favourite book is…
I can’t do favourites but Animal Farm is up there.
The best book I ever received is…
Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.
The book I would give as a gift is …
All About Love by bell hooks.
My childhood favourite book …
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and the fables of Kalīla wa-Dimna.
My favourite writer is…
Still no single favourite but Toni Morrison and James Baldwin come to mind.
The book everyone should read at least once is…
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
The Flirtation of Girls was published on November 28 with UQP. You can find it at any good bookstore.
Image: Sara M. Saleh captured by Stefanie Zingsheim and sourced from @instasaranade
