Excerpt from A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim

My instincts didn't fail me, Hind. At dawn on that cold winter day, they'd already warned me of the ill omen lying in wait for us at Sidi Othman Ennaifer's house.

The harbingers of calamity came in the dead of night, when the hand of Boutelis, the jinn of sleep paralysis, snatched me by the neck out of a deep slumber. The damned creature knelt on my chest, pulling my tongue with his claws and pressing his heavy weight down into my ribs until my bones almost sliced my flesh open. If not for the barrage of prayers I assaulted him with in my head—as my Lella Bashira had taught me—he wouldn't have let me go alive.

In my long life, that jinn of sleep has only visited me twice, Hind. In both cases, the next morning brought an appointment with disaster.

On the morning following his first visit, when I was still a child, I received news of my father's death. Word came down from the mountain while I was in the capital, at Lella Bashira's house on Rue El Azzafine. Based on what my maternal uncle, Dhawi, told the gendarme, Baba was killed by a kick from his gray mule next to the door of our house. When questioned, Khal Dhawi told the gendarmes that Baba's mule surprised him with a kick to the stomach as he unloaded her, laying him out flat, near-dead. Then, as if the mule still wasn't satisfied, she trampled him, kicking him repeatedly with her hooves in a sud¬den fit of rage. My mother was the last person to see Baba alive. After the funeral, and to her dying day, she never spoke to my uncle again. She kept his secret, but she never forgave him. My God have mercy on her and forgive her.

Boutelis's second visit augured what was to happen in Sidi Othman's house, which I'll describe to you now, and which must remain a secret. Promise me that you won't share it with anyone, Hind, not even your husband—this is a family secret not for the ears of in-laws.

That night I said a short prayer of protection as soon as I managed to move my tongue, then with trepidation fell back into a fitful sleep plagued by nightmares. When I heard the dawn call to prayer coming from the Sidi Makhlouf Mosque, I dragged my exhausted body out of bed. I needed to start my daily chores for Sidi Othman's household, starting with heat¬ing up the water for the family members to perform their pre-prayer ablutions.

But just as I began to slip my feet into my clogs, a scream shook the walls and ceiling of the dark house. It was coming from Lella Zbaida's room.

My heart leapt out of my chest with fear and worry. Lella Zbaida was still lying in, having just given birth to your father, Sidi Mostafa. It had only been two or three weeks since the birth, and it had been a hard labor. I was afraid something bad had happened to the baby, like what happened to his older brother, Sidi Mohammed Habib's twin, a year and a half be¬fore. On that night, he nursed until he was full, fell asleep with rosy cheeks and regular breath, then never woke up. Although he was barely forty days old, many people attended his funeral. The status of the dead in the capital is measured by their lin¬eage, rather than their good deeds.

That dawn, I hurried down the hall with my head uncov¬ered, holding my clog in one hand and a lantern in the other, not caring if one of the men of the house saw me in immodest clothing. They all knew that Lella Zbaida wasn't just my lady; she was like my sister. Otherwise, she wouldn't have insisted on bringing me with her to her husband's house. Her mother, Lella Bashira, hadn't wanted to let me go, and her new mother-in-law, Lella Jnayna, had given the superfluous maid a cold welcome.

The maid's room was located between the kitchen and the storage room in the western section of the house; Lella Zbaida's room was in the southern section, on the upper floor desig¬nated for her and her family. The owners of the house—Lella Zbaida's mother-in-law, Lella Jnayna Sharif, and her father-in-law, Sidi Othman Ennaifer—had rooms surrounding the central courtyard, along with Sidi Mhammed, their youngest son (who would be a source of tribulation to them but at that time was a student at the university of the great Zaytuna Mosque). The girls' rooms—your father's paternal aunts, Mannana, Nozha, and Beya—had been closed up, one after the other, as they mar¬ried and took their places in their husbands' homes.

Excerpted from A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim. Copyright © 2025 by Amira Ghenim. Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.