This September Sun: The Novel with Legs

Bryony Rheam, whose debut novel, This September Sun, was first published in Zimbabwe in 2009, is set to travel to the 2020 Cairo International Book Fair at the beginning of February as a guest of honour.

The amaBooks cover

The Al-Arabi cover

The novel was launched at the Cairo International Book Fair at the beginning of 2019, having been translated into Arabic and published by the Egyptian publisher, Al-Arabi. The book fair is the largest and oldest book fair in the Arab world, held every year since 1969, and Al-Arabi have exhibited at the fair for forty years. Last year the fair attracted two and a half million visitors.

Cairo International Book Fair

According to Al-Arabi publisher Sherif Bakr, This September Sun has travelled the Arab world since the launch, from Morocco to the Arabian Gulf. In discussing last year's Cairo International Book Fair in an interview with ahramonline, Sherif Bakr said: “We did well; our new titles of translated novels and books in general were very well received with people being very happy to go through piles of books that bring to them ideas from Finland, Serbia, Austria, Zimbabwe and many other countries,” Bakr said.

"One of this year’s newly translated titles for Al-Arabi is the Arabic version of Bryony Rheam’s This September Sun, the gratifying novel that came out in late 2009, examining layers of the lives of the 'settlers' of Rhodesia that continue to haunt Zimbabwe’s grandchildren."

Sherif Bakr

This is the first Africa-centred novel translation for Al-Arabi that has otherwise, over the past four decades, brought to its readers a wide range of political readings on Africa.

The translation of the novel was agreed at the Frankfurt Book Fair in  2016 when Brian Jones, co-director of amaBooks and a participant at the Frankfurt Book Fair Invitation Programme, was introduced to Sherif Bakr by a colleague on the Invitation Programme, Aly Abdel-Moneim of Daraj Publishing. Aly had been enthralled by the description of This September Sun and thought that Al-Arabi publishers would be interested.

Bryony Rheam is very excited to be invited to Cairo and looks forward to meeting readers of her work based in the Arab world. Previously she has appeared at a number of festivals, including the Intwasa Arts Festival in Zimbabwe, the Ake Arts and Book Festival in Nigeria and Africa Utopia in the United Kingdom.