article author: Sumaiyya Naseem Mon, 2026-07-20 09: 19 JEDDAH: In “Cleopatra, ” British author Saara El-Arifi — who has Sudanese and Ghanaian heritage and spent her early years in Abu Dhabi before moving to the UK — sets out to reclaim the Egyptian monarch’s voice through a first-person narrative styled as a memoir. “This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived, ” Cleopatra declares to the reader early on in this historical novel, rejecting sensationalist accounts of her dramatic demise that have dominated mainstream perceptions of the last active pharaoh of Egypt. Main category: Lifestyle books
Book review: A queen reclaims her voice in Saara El-Arifi’s historical epic ‘Cleopatra’
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