Amin Maalouf - Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way

Breathtaking analysis of the current global crisis from one of the Arab worlds most respected writers

The United States is losing its moral credibility. The European Union is breaking apart. Africa, the Arab world, and the Mediterranean are becoming battlefields for various regional and global powers. Extreme forms of nationalism are on the rise. Thus divided, humanity is unable to address global threats to the environment and our health. How did we get here and what is yet to come? World-renowned scholar and bestselling author Amin Maalouf seeks to raise awareness and pursue a new human solidarity. In Adrift , Maalouf traces how civilizations have drifted apart throughout the 20th century, mixing personal narrative and historical analysis to provide a warning signal for the future.

Praise for Amin Maalouf

Maalouf is a thoughtful, humane and passionate interlocutor.

New York Times Book Review

He is one of that small handful of writers, like David Grossman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are indispensable to us in our current crisis.

New York Times

Maaloufs fiction offers both a model for the future and a caution, a way towards cultural understanding and an appalling measure of the consequences of failure. His is a voice which Europe cannot afford to ignore.

The Guardian

Maalouf writes intriguing novels of exceptional quality.

NRC Handelsblad

At this time of fundamentalist identity seekers, Amins is a voice of wisdom and sanity that sings the complexity and wonder of belonging to many places. He is a fabulist raconteur; he tells vastly entertaining adventure stories that are also deeply philosophical.

ARIEL DORFMAN, author of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile

Amin Maalouf seems to follow Flaubert in looking at the East, but he centres the narrative differently: its the Orient telling itself. You learn about the multiplicity of cultures, their openness and permeability; that the boundaries between religions are not as hard and fast as weve been led to believe.

AAMER HUSSEIN, author of 37 Bridges

Amin Maalouf, one of the Arab worlds most influential writers, weaves extraordinary tales in his novels, mixing historical events, romantic love, fantasy, and imagination. Yet at the core of all these well-crafted works lies a deep element of philosophical and psychological inquiry into the nature and condition of contemporary man.

AUB (American University of Beirut)

Praise for Adrift

Adrift is both an elegy for the Levant in which he grew up, and a reflection on the violent fragmentation and political malaise of globalized capitalism. In Maaloufs portrait, the world in which COVID-19 made its calamitous appearance is disoriented and dangerously unequal, fragmented into identity-based groups, at war with one another yet all beholden to the market.

The London Review of Books

The writer and scholar delves back into his own history to analyze the tragic consequences of the shock prophesized by Samuel Huntington.

Le Figaro Magazine

True change is possible: Maalouf shows us possible ways forward in magnificent prose filled with wisdom.

La Provence

A marvelous, luminous piece of writing.

Europe 1

Wonderful and terrifying.

La Grande Librairie France 5

A powerful voice.

France Culture

Over rupture and conflict, Amin Maalouf has always preferred epics of encounters, beginnings, and connections.

Le Point

An alarming report on the state of the world.

Le Soir

Praise for The Disoriented

A thoughtful, philosophically rich story that probes a still-open wound.

Kirkus Reviews

A powerful and nostalgic current of lost paradise and stolen youth.

Huffington Post

A great, sensitive testimony on the vulnerability of the individual in an age of global migration.

STEFAN HERTMANS, author of War and Turpentine and The Convert

There are novels which reverberate long after youve finished reading them. Amin Maaloufs The Disoriented is such a novel. This is a voyage between the Orient and the West, the past and the present, as only the 1993 Goncourt Prize winner knows how to write it.

Le Figaro

Amin Maalouf gives us a perfect look at the thoughts and feelings that can lead to emigration. One can only be impressed by the magnitude and the precision of his introspection.

Le Monde des Livres

Maaloufs new book, The Disoriented , marks his return to the novel with fanfare. It is a very endearing book.

Lire

Maalouf makes a rare incursion into the twentieth century, and he evokes his native Lebanon in a state of war, a painful subject which until now he had only touched upon.

Jeune Afrique

The great virtue of this beautiful novel is that it concedes a human element to war, that it unravels the Lebanese carpet to undo its knots and loosen its strings.

LExpress

Amin Maalouf has an intact love of Lebanon inside him, as well as ever-enduring suffering and great nostalgia for his youth, of which he has perhaps never spoken of as well as he has in this novel.

Page des Libraires

Full of human warmth and told in an Oriental style, this is a sensitive reflection told through touching portraits.

Notes Bibliographiques

A great work, which explores the wounds of exile and the compromises of those who stay.

LAmour des Livres

What Maalouf discusses in this novel is nothing less than the conflict between the Arab world and the West. A personal, honest search for the greatest challenge of current world politics.

De Volkskrant

Maalouf addresses themes such as multiculturalism, friendship, and disruptive conflict in a pleasant style. The Disoriented is a book that enriches readers by providing insight into the memories and facts of life of people from other cultures.

Literair Nederland

Maalouf manages to draw the reader into a beautiful story that honours friendship and loyalty as essential parts of a decent human existence. He does not judge his characters. No one is completely bad, no one is completely good, all of his characters are recognizable people who are attractive because of their flaws.

De Wereld Morgen

The Disoriented is the new, long-awaited novel by Amin Maalouf, and perhaps his most personal, emotional, and compelling. A novel about memory, friendship, love.

La Compagnia del Mar Rosso

Praise for Disordered World

With his consciously nurtured multiple identity, Maalouf is just the sort of interlocutor this period needs. He reaches deep into unmined seams of cultural history, scything elegantly through clich and conventional models of received wisdom.

Financial Times

Should be prescribed reading in the Foreign Office and on the foreign desk of newspapers and the BBC .

The Spectator , Books of the Year

Stimulating and provocative.

Sunday Times

Maalouf is perfectly placed and wonderfully qualified to shed light on the pervasive sense that there is a cataclysmic battle in progress between civilisations and systems of belief. Disordered World is full of insight.

The Observer

Praise for Leo Africanus

Leo Africanus is a beautiful book of tales about people who are forced to accept choices made for them by someone elseit relates, poetically at times and often imaginatively, the story of those who did not make it to the New World.

New York Times

Utterly fascinating.

BBC World Service

A celebration of the romance and power of the Arab world, its ideals and achievements.

Daily Telegraph

Maalouf offers a lurid history lesson in this sweeping, sympathetic portrayal of Islamic culture of the period.