On the Greenwich Line

by Shady Lewis

£12.99

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‘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, author of My Friends and The Return

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 in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls.

Translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls

Publication date: 18 February 2025
176p, paperback with flaps, £12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908670-95-3

Press & Reviews

'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, author of My Friends and The Return

'A profoundly Egyptian novel that is a bit British too. But the back and forth of East and West that Shady Lewis offers us here is far from the cliched stories we have become accustomed to.'
– Le Monde

'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 humor 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

'Set between the Arab world and Europe, this novel is distinguished by its impertinent, sometimes ironically loving, style, and imbued with a typically British humor.'
- Shathil Nawaf Taqa, The Counter

'On the Greenwich Line is both deeply despairing, and perfectly funny and joyful.'
- Hassina Mechaï, Middle East Eye

'The absurdities of everyday life are intertwined with memories of childhood, as the Middle Eastern immigrant is confronted with Western prejudices. [The book is] Bitingly funny, amd the Egyptians as well as the English are torn to pieces. You will not be bored On the Greenwich Line.'
- Frédérique Roussel, Libération

'The final scene of the novel is a firework of darkly absurd humor. This ease in marrying sentiment and irony is the mark of Shady Lewis's great mastery. On the Greenwich Line is his first novel translated from Arabic – we await the next one.'
- Lisbeth Koutchoumoff, Le Temps

About The Book

Author

Shady Lewis, born 1978, is an Egyptian novelist and journalist whose writing centres on cultural and political intersections within and beyond the Arab world. He lives in London, where he has spent many years employed by the National Health Service and local authority housing departments, working with homeless people and patients with complex needs. He has published three novels in Arabic to date – The Lord’s Ways (2018), On the Greenwich Line (2019), and A Brief History of Genesis and Eastern Cairo (2021) – each of which engage with the social history of Coptic Christians and trajectories of migration from Egypt to the West, and a travel diary, Death Tourism, or a Comedy of Foreigners (2024). On the Greenwich Line has also been translated into German, French and Italian; the French translation was shortlisted for the 2023 Prix de la littérature arabe.

Translator

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. Her critically acclaimed translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, she was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed and her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace received the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award. Her work has appeared in Frieze, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Common, Asymptote, and others. She is one third of teneleven, an agency for contemporary Arabic literature.

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