The novel genre in Arabic generally is sometimes described as ‘young’ because it entered a language reputed for its age-old tradition of poetry mainly through European literary influence and can only be dated back to the 1870s in its earliest enunciations. However, this happened only in the relatively developed cultural centres at the time of Cairo and Beirut. It took much longer for the genre to evolve in other parts of the Arabic-speaking world, and in the case of Libya, it was to make its tentative appearance only a hundred years later in the 1970s. But it was not perhaps until the 1990s that some mature works began to attract attention in literary circles, while some individual writers with exceptional talent, well ahead of cultural development within Libya as a whole, began to come to the fore and attract attention with the quality of their work beyond Libya and the Arab world, for example Ibrahim al-Koni and Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih, now translated into many European languages. Not only that but there are now some Anglophone Libyans writing in the diaspora having fled Gaddafi 's repression, such as Hisham Matar, one of the authors studied in this monograph.

While the Libyan novel has made admirable progress in just a few decades, scholarship has lagged behind badly. You will find an article here or a chapter there looking at limited parts of the picture, but no systematic study of the emergence and development of the genre as a whole in Libya, no examination of the major exponents and themes in the context of the despotic regime of Gaddafi who came to power in 1969, around the time of the nascence of the genre in the country. This unsatisfactory condition is what the current monograph, the first in English about the Libyan novel, proffers to correct. Charis Olszok does not only provide a survey of the evolution of the genre in the Libyan context but also goes on to focus on its major writers and analyse in detail some of their salient works.