unnecessarywomanImagine a world where you spend close to your entire life translating a book a year into your native tongue and once completed you store them in a box for no one to see. It sounds crazy but when you meet Aaliya Saleh the lead character in Rabih Alameddine’s engaging new novel An Unnecessary Woman you will meet the woman who has done this with her life and find out why.

An Unnecessary Woman takes place in present-day Beirut. Aaliya is a woman with a lot of opinions on things and she doesn’t hold back. She especially has to lots to say about the writers of today and yesteryear. The stories she tells in this book are about her life working in a bookstore, her friends, neighbors, her crazy family, Beirut history and anything else that has made her the woman she is today. Her love of books also makes her able to quote lines from novels as if she were reciting the names of her children. As tragic as she comes across in the novel, you almost envy her life’s simplicity filled with books.

I’m sure we’ve all met a woman like Aaliya in our lifetime. It’s that elderly neighbor or woman who you meet on the street and wonder what her life was like. Is she just an old lady or man or does she have a rich life full of life lessons that we could learn from?

An Unnecessary Woman is a bibliophile’s dream come true. It is also for anybody who loves a character in a novel that literally comes to life on the pages. Someone you’d  love to have a cup of tea with.

Aaliya is certainly a character that is going to stick with you for a while and you’ll be jotting down all the names of the books that she loves and calling your nearest bookstore to make sure they have it in stock (Yes, call me old-fashioned, I still love bookstores, even more so after reading this book!)  A helpful hint for you is to wait until you complete the entire novel before you head out to the bookstore because your want list won’t let up until the very last page. Or in the words of Shakespeare, “Oh well never mind, you get the point.”