Dreamy and strange and totally singular.

McKayla Coyle, Literary Hub

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A vivid portrait of faith, feminism, and contemporary Egypt.

Sophia M. Stewart, The Millions

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[A] powerful, shimmering and clever novel.

Kate McLoughlin, The Times Literary Supplement

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Unflinching in the portrayal of women’s bodies mobilized in protest, The Dissenters is a complex novel about womanhood, political resistance, and personal history.

Isabella Zhou, Foreword Reviews

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Rakha’s project is an admirable and inspired one.

Kirkus Reviews

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A work of art unafraid of peeling back the layers of history to find the often ugly and complicated truth beneath. . . . In The Dissenters, Rakha has successfully created a novel that is wholly his own.

Alex Ramirez-Amaya, Aquifer

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The Dissenters is by turns haunted, horrifying, and hilarious. At heart, though, it’s an elegy for lost revolutions, generations… but never really lost, not in that land of revenants. You’ll end up knowing more about the real, perhaps hyper-real, Egypt than you will from many a history. Knowing, too, that love’s more real still: more real than time.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith

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Youssef Rakha is the rare writer who is actually paying attention and trying to make sense of the world while many are devolving into despair. The Dissenters creates a world outside the tinted windows of power, even if that means challenging the abyss.

Yuri Herrera

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A rewarding and sprawling portrait of modern Egypt as reflected through the life story of a complicated Egyptian woman… Readers will be mesmerized.

Publishers Weekly

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One of the most original and inventive writers of his generation.

Omar Robert Hamilton

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The Dissenters is the book of witnessing par excellence, telling not the story of just one woman or one Egypt, but rather of all of us who are of these geographies.

Salar Abdoh

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The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lifestyles set them on a collision course with Egypt’s military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath

Amitav Gosh

Coverage

Mentions in LitHub, The Millions, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, The National Abu Dhabi, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, Vogue Arabia, ArtReview, CLMP, and The Chicago Review of Books.

Excerpts in Triple Canopy, Bidoun, The Dial, and Brittle Paper.

Conversations in The Master’s Review, The Adroit Journal, Doek, The New Arab, Qantara.de, and Pub Cheerleaders.

Audio/video conversations with Eman Quotah, Linda Moqdad, Danial Ford, Hilary Plum, Teresa Pepe, Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, and alongside Laila Slimani and Soukaina Habiballah.

Reviews in The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The TLS, The Florida Review, Foreword, Bomb, Arablit, Kirkus Reviews, World Literature Today, Sojourners, the Arab Studies Quarterly, the Pub Cheerleaders Substack, Joseph Schreiber’s roughghosts.com, Joe Linker’s The Coming of the Toads, Unruly, and Summer Farah’s Medium.

My own piece on what The Dissenters has meant.