Allah's Spacious Earth by Omar Sayfo

Allah's Spacious Earth is a stunningly fresh and timely political dystopia that depicts the tragic yet very real consequences of tensions between majority populations and Muslim minorities in the Western world. The novel is set in an imagined future where anti-Muslim sentiment and political pressure lead to a community being cut off from the rest of society. Told from the perspective of Nasim, a young Muslim living in the Zone-an urban area within one of the states forming the Pan-European Federation-the story follows his journey as he struggles with the restrictions imposed upon him along with the expectations of his community.

In the tradition of Michel Houellbecq's Submission and Boualem Sansal's 2084, Allah's Spacious Earth is a powerful novel of ideas that brilliantly captures a growing fear in Western societies and its devastating fallout.

Omar Sayfo is a Syrian-Hungarian journalist and expert on Middle Eastern media at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University. He is the author of several books, including Arab Animation: Images of Identity.

Paul Olchvary has translated more than ten books from Hungarian, including Gyoergy Dragoman's novel The White King. He has received translation awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, and Hungary's Milan Fust Foundation. His shorter translations have appeared in The Paris Review, The Hungarian Quarterly, and turnrow.