Still, readers will find no shortage of characters they’ll want to spend time with, and a dramatic wedding scene at the end makes up for earlier missteps. More frustrating, at times Haddad seems so bent on saving the major confrontations for novel’s end that early sections become bogged down in bouts of interior monologue. It also leads to some clunky phrasing: a woman wears a T-shirt “which has the name of the college I went to in America,” etc. For a novel so much about place and politics, Haddad’s decision not to identify the Arab country where the bulk of the narrative is set, nor the American city where Rasa studies, is difficult to understand. But a certain coyness pervades the narrative, at times distracting from an otherwise absorbing story. Rasa, introspective and witty, makes a sympathetic narrator, and the story is filled with moments of heartbreak and tension (a loaded scene involving Rasa, the Western journalist he translates for, and a husband-wife team of Islamic revolutionaries is especially well-done). As Rasa grapples with these conflicts, he also remembers his past-from his sexual awakening to his four years in America for college to experiences at his one refuge, the neighborhood bar/underground gay club that gives the novel its title. First his grandmother catches him in bed with his lover, then his best friend is arrested at a gay cinema. Set against the backdrop of a country on the brink of civil war, Haddad’s debut novel follows a young gay man, Rasa, over a tense 24 hours.

Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity, as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family.In an unnamed Middle Eastern country, a young translator deals with the fallout after his grandmother catches him with another man. Ashamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, Rasa roams the city’s slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country’s elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar, Guapa, who has been arrested by the police.

One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval.

Guapa a novel