SWANA Authors

The Home That Was Our Country

By: Alia Malek

Narrated by: Alia Malek

Length: 12 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parent's decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia... Read more

Down and Across

By: Arvin Ahmadi

Narrated by: Assaf Cohen

Length: 7 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

"John Green fans will appreciate this tale." —USA Today
"[A] humorous, deeply human coming-of-age story." —The Washington Post

Scott Ferdowsi has a track record of quitting. His best friends know exactly what they want to do with the rest of their lives, but Scott can hardly commit to a breakfast cereal, let alone a passion. With college... Read more

Frankenstein in Baghdad

By: Ahmed Saadawi

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini & Kaleo Griffith

Length: 8 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

*International Booker Prize finalist*

“Brave and ingenious.” —The New York Times

“Gripping, darkly humorous . . . profound.” —Phil Klay, bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment

“Extraordinary . . . A devastating but essential read.” —Kevin Powers, bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds

... Read more

The Last Girl

By: Nadia Murad

Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin

Length: 12 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE • In this “courageous” (The Washington Post) memoir of survival, a former captive of the Islamic State tells her harrowing and ultimately inspiring story.
 
Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and... Read more

American Radical

By: Tamer Elnoury & Kevin Maurer

Narrated by: Peter Ganim

Length: 9 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The explosive memoir of a Muslim American FBI agent fighting terror from the inside.

It’s no secret that federal agencies are waging a broad, global war against terror. But for the first time in this memoir, an active Muslim American federal agent reveals his experience infiltrating and bringing down a terror cell in... Read more

A Horse Walks Into a Bar

By: David Grossman

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Length: 5 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of standup. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as the awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually,... Read more

Headscarves and Hymens

By: Mona Eltahawy

Narrated by: Mona Eltahawy

Length: 5 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

A passionate manifesto decrying misogyny in the Arab world, by an Egyptian American journalist and activist

When the Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy published an article in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012 titled "Why Do They Hate Us?" it provoked a firestorm of controversy. The response it generated, with more than four thousand posts on the... Read more

Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel

By: Sara Farizan

Narrated by: Negin Farsad

Length: 5 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

Leila has made it most of the way through Armstead Academy without having a crush on anyone, which is a relief. As an Iranian American, she's different enough; if word got out that Leila liked girls, life would be twice as hard.  But when beautiful new girl Saskia shows up, Leila starts to take risks she never thought she would.

As she carefully... Read more

If You Could Be Mine

By: Sara Farizan

Narrated by: Negin Farsad

Length: 5 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Seventeen-year-old Sahar has been in love with her best friend, Nasrin, since they were six. They’ve shared stolen kisses and romantic promises. But Iran is a dangerous place for two girls in love—Sahar and Nasrin could be beaten, imprisoned, even executed if their relationship came to light.

So they carry on in secret—until Nasrin’s parents... Read more

Equal of the Sun

By: Anita Amirrezvani

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 13 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

Iran in 1576 is a place of peace, wealth, and dazzling beauty. But when the Shah dies without having named an heir, the court is thrown into tumult. Princess Pari, the Shah's daughter and closest adviser, knows more about the inner workings of the state than almost anyone, but the princess's maneuvers to instill order after her father's sudden... Read more

Birds of Paradise

By: Diana Abu-Jaber

Narrated by: Tamara Marston

Length: 14 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Avis Muir is a brilliant pastry chef, Brian Muir a corporate real estate attorney. Their son, Stanley, is the proprietor of a trendy food market. Their beautiful daughter, Felice, is missing. A runaway at 13, Felice has spent five years modeling tattoos, skateboarding, clubbing, and sleeping in a squat house or on the beach. She’s about to turn... Read more

Anatomy of a Disappearance

By: Hisham Matar

Narrated by: Khalid Abdalla

Length: 5 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees her, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri’s... Read more

A History of the Arab Peoples

By: Albert Hourani

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 21 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Despite the turmoil of Arab nationalism and fundamentalism, Middle Eastern wars, and oil crises, the history of the Arab world has been little known and poorly understood in the West. One reason may be that, for more than half a century, there has been no up-to-date single-volume work that chronicles the story of Arab civilization—until... Read more

Reset

By: Stephen Kinzer

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

Length: 9 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

What can the United States do to help realize its dream of a peaceful, democratic Middle East? Stephen Kinzer offers a surprising answer in this paradigm-shifting book. Two countries in the region, he argues, are America's logical partners in the twenty-first century: Turkey and Iran.

Besides proposing this new "power triangle," Kinzer... Read more

The Persian Night

By: Amir Taheri

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 14 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Three decades after Khomeinist thugs raided the US embassy in Tehran, Westerners are puzzled by Iran. As a nation, Iranians still like the United States; as a revolutionary regime, however, Iran is the principal bastion of anti-Americanism. As a nation-state, Iran is not concerned with the Palestinian issue; but as a revolutionary cause, the... Read more

The Prophet

By: Kahlil Gibran

Narrated by: Jonathan Reese

Length: 2 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Kahlil Gibran—poet, philosopher, and artist—was born in Lebanon in 1883 but spent his final twenty years of life living in the United States. The three books that compose this audiobook are collections of Gibran's aphorisms, parables, and poetic essays.

The first book, The Prophet, was originally published in 1923 and is considered Gibran's... Read more

The Prophet, & The Wanderer

By: Khalil Gibran

Narrated by: Robert Glenister

Length: 3 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) was Lebanese by birth but spent a major part of his life in America in the early part of the twentieth century. He wrote many collections of stories with a wise or whimsical tone, but none more popular than The Prophet, his first collection, or The Wanderer, his final anthology. They are read here with great sympathy... Read more

The Blood of Flowers

By: Anita Amirrezvani

Narrated by: Shohreh Aghdashloo

Length: 13 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

A sensuous and richly-imagined historical novel that centers on a skilled young carpet weaver, her arranged marriage, and her quest for self-determination in 17th-century Persia.

In 17th-century Iran, a 14-year-old woman believes she will be married within the year. But when her beloved father dies, she and her mother find themselves alone and... Read more

Leap of Faith

By: Noor al-Hussein

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Length: 16 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Leap of Faith is the dramatic and inspiring story of an American woman’s remarkable journey into the heart of a man and his nation.Born into a distinguished Arab-American family and raised amid privilege, Lisa Halaby joined the first freshman class at Princeton to accept women, graduating in 1974 with a degree in architecture and urban planning.... Read more

Bin Laden

By: Yossef Bodansky

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 21 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Who is Osama bin Laden—the only terrorist leader ever to have declared a holy war? What drives him and his followers to hate the Western civilization that has armed them? Bin Laden’s name has been linked to a number of incidents that have cost Americans their lives, most conspicuously, the catastrophic assaults on the World Trade Center and the... Read more

The Prophet

By: Kahlil Gibran

Narrated by: Becky Ann Baker

Length: 1 hour 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Gibran considered The Prophet to be his greatest achievement. First published in 1923, The Prophet has been translated into more than twenty languages, and has become one of the beloved classics of our time. Cherished by millions, the universally inspiring words of The Prophet are here magnificently read aloud. Read more

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

By: Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Narrated by: Ray Porter

Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, takes us into the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupation in Iraq. In this bubble separated from wartime realities, the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competes with the distractions of a Little America—a half-dozen bars, a disco, a shopping... Read more

Crescent - Abridged

By: Diana Abu-Jaber

Narrated by: Nike Doukas & Marcelo Tubert

Length: 8 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: Yes

An Arab-American Chocolat—a sensual blend of food, love and longing. Read more