The Diesel

Critically shunned when it was first published in 1994, nearly two decades before the rest of the world ever envisioned an Arab Spring, Emirati author Thani Al-Suwaidi saw a cultural shift on the horizon and his novel now serves as a revelation for the modern world—a stream-of-consciousness dissection of an orthodox past and a perilous future which is no longer preventable. With the power of petroleum greater than any society could have imagined, especially in the Middle Eastern communities where it is produced, this story challenges the inhabitants and inheritors of those traditions to push beyond and consider who they are and what they desire. Among contrasting cultures, characters, and mystical creatures in a small Arab community—one accustomed to ancestral attitudes and social constraints—Al-Suwaidi examines this force as ultimately segregating fathers and sons, villages and empires, and love and lust.