One day, the female jinn disappear from Oman's capital Muscat.
The modernisation of Muscat brought electricity and cement, but people’s spirits hardened and dried up, and the female jinn disappeared. Life lost all its playfulness and joy until Zubayda and seven women friends decide to take over the powers of the lost jinn, transforming into enchanting story-telling Cinderellas until the stroke of midnight.
During the modernisation of Muscat, people’s spirits seemed to harden and dry up, and one day the female jinn just disappeared. Where did they go to? Have they all died, are they in hiding after losing out to electricity and cement, to air conditioners and televisions? Has life lost its playfulness and joy without the transformational powers of the jinn? Are life’s sweet moments of pleasure and sensual delight no more, now the inhabitants are weighed down with daily chores, boring work, and all the routines apparently necessary for modern life? It seemed so, until a group of enterprising women, all mothers and wives overburdened with one thing after another, decided they had to somehow recover the powers of the lost female jinn. Omani author Huda Hamed recounts the vivid stories Zubayda and her seven friends tell each other, revealing secrets until then suppressed, as on one special night they transform into Cinderellas. Though not searching for a prince, they meet together in Chef Ramon’s restaurant on the beach front of Muscat for a few hours of precious independence before midnight comes.
Huda Hamed is an Omani writer and journalist, born in Rustaq, Oman, in 1981. She has a degree in Arabic literature from Aleppo University, Syria, and has published five collections of short stories and four novels. Her debut novel was Al-Ashia’ Laysat fi Amakiniha (2009, Things are Not in Their Place), which received the award of best novel in Oman for 2009, and was excerpted in Banipal 44, 2012. Her next, Allati Ta’udu al-Salalim (2014, Who Counts the Stairs), was published, in English translation by Nadine Sinno and William Taggart, as I Saw Her in My Dreams (Emerging Voices from the Middle East, Texas University Press) in 2023. Then came this book Sanderillat Masqat (2016, The Cinderellas of Muscat), and Assamina (2019, Our Names). The short story collections include Namima Maliha (2006, Salty Gossip), Laysa bil-dhabt kama Ureed (2009, Not exactly as I want), and Al-Isharah Bourtuqaliya al-Ann (2013, The Traffic Lights are Amber Now). Huda Hamed is currently editor-in-chief of Oman’s quarterly cultural magazine Niswa, based in Muscat. Chip Rossetti has translated several works of contemporary Arabic fiction, including the story collections Animals in Our Days by Mohamed Makhzangi and No Windmills in Basra, by Diaa Jubaili, as well as the novels Beirut, Beirut by Sonallah Ibrahim, Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, and the graphic novel Metro by Magdy Elshafee.His latest published translation is the novel Rose’s Diaries, by the Emirati novelist Reem al-Kamali, whose Arabic original was shortlisted for the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He works as the Editorial Director for the Library of Arabic Literature bilingual book series at NYU Press and has a PhD on the Iraqi writer Muhammad Khudayyir from the University of Pennsylvania. His short translations have appeared in the White Review, Asymptote, Banipal and Words Without Borders.
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