A popular Libyan expression goes that ‘the luckless finds bones in a stomach’. The term for ‘luckless’, the idiomatic ‘rāqid al-rīḥ’ – literally, ‘the sleeper on the wind’ – signifis someone with no family, home or possessions, and aptly evokes the characters that populate what I term the Libyan ‘novel of survival’. Close to the English ‘going from bad to worse’, but more directly ‘going from little to less’, the expression evokes the empty-handedness of these novels, in which the complexities of existence shift to bare survival. Such narratives form a distinct canon in Libyan fiction, paralleling the prominent rural imaginary of neighbouring Egypt, where, as Samah Selim suggests, the figure of the fallāḥ (peasant) crystallises ‘an ongoing social and textual dialogue’. Across the border, the Libyan subsistence survivor, whether fisherman, water carrier or goatherd, is characterised by precarity, always hunting for the next ‘crust of bread’ (kisrat al-khubz luqmat al-ʿaysh). The survivor is, furthermore, never far from animals, whether battling them or empathising with their similar struggle, while the environment exists in fragile harmony, demanding balance and restraint.

Most frequently, these dramas return to Italian occupation, or the aftermath of the Second World War, when Libya was recognised by the UN as the poorest nation in the world, with scant chance of development. Through this pre-oil past, and the military and commercial forces that shaped it, writers reflect on the present building of nation, as the laws that codified human relationships to one another and the environment disintegrate, alongside the dividing line between need and desire, ‘subsistence’ (rizq) and ‘satiation’ (shabʿ).