Four books that put you in Kuwait. Two are by writers from Kuwait and set there: The Bamboo Stalk and The Hidden Light of Objects. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Very little writing from Kuwait has reached English, but Saud Alsanousi's The Bamboo Stalk won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013. It tells of a Kuwaiti-Filipino son who returns to face Kuwait's class hierarchy. Kuwait has long mattered to Arab readers: the monthly Al-Arabi, founded there in 1958, was read across the region, and Ismail Fahd Ismail is often called the father of the Kuwaiti novel. Mai Al-Nakib's The Hidden Light of Objects links stories of family, class, expatriate neighbours and the Gulf War.
Earlier Kuwait, a Gulf trading town of pearl divers and desert tribes, is described mostly by visitors. Violet Dickson's Forty Years in Kuwait is a British woman's memoir of Bedouin customs, plants and animals from the 1920s to the 1960s. Jill Crystal's Kuwait: The Transformation of an Oil State traces how oil reshaped the merchant families and the ruling family.
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A Kuwaiti-Filipino son returns to Kuwait and meets its class hierarchy, its attitudes to migrant workers and its stigma around belonging.
Linked short stories of everyday Kuwaiti life, including class, family, expatriate neighbours and the effects of the Gulf War.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Kuwait.
A memoir of desert and town life in Kuwait from the 1920s to 1960s, rich in Bedouin customs, plants and animals.
A missionary doctor's memoir of treating Kuwaiti women and families in the mid-twentieth century, before and during the oil boom.
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