Book of the Week: ON THE GREENWICH LINE by Shady Lewis (translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls)
In an East London housing office, a frustrated local government employee spends his days trying to figure out what the latest policy announcement means for both himself and the migrants he works with every day. As a favour to a friend, he finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. But it is not until his life collides with Ghiyath’s death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who’ve fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy, but mitigates systemic failure with humanity and courage.
Winner of the 2026 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Judges’ citation: “The panel praised the book’s sensitive yet subversive portrayal of immigrant life in London and the banal cruelty of the British state’s treatment of asylum seekers under austerity. We loved its distinctive narrative voice, which continually wrongfoots the reader’s assumptions, and were impressed by its skilful combination of British and Egyptian literary sensibilities, especially a shared affinity for the satirical and absurd. Lewis is a master of tone, shifting with apparent ease between the poignant and the comic, with the book’s mercurial qualities rendered capably into English in Halls’s wonderful translation.”
”I was riveted and charmed by this funny, humane and poignant novel. It's written in a voice that is as ardent as it is sensitive, one marked by history and yet managing to remain beautifully unruly and independent.” —Hisham Matar
”Shady Lewis makes fun of everything and everyone with great humanity: we become attached to these characters who are more lost than crazy, who do what they can keep going. Lewis, with scathing humour and a healthy lightness of touch, examines everything: from the god Khnum to Margaret Thatcher via Karl Marx, freedom of expression, Facebook, romantic breakups, colonization, identity and religious tensions — nothing escapes his acerbic and lucid gaze. A delicious tragicomic novel about contemporary society.” —Nina Chastel, Orient XXI
”This introspective novel delights with its finesse and depth, and invites us to look at reality from the author's sensitive perspective. In painfully beautiful, funny and tragic prose, Shady Lewis skilfully and accurately expresses the difficulty of being excluded and stigmatised because of their difference.” —Nadia Leila Aissaoui, l'Orient litteraire