The Apartment on Passy Street

Jamil lives in a luxurious apartment with his Parisian lover, enjoying a life of bourgeois comfort and indulgence. Yet he remains an immigrant without legal status, trapped in his otherness and in a life of dependence limited in duration. His friend Amir, who emigrated with him from Palestine to France during the Second Intifada, soon developed symptoms of AIDS that turned his life upside down, and the two went their separate ways. Years later, they meet by chance in one of Paris's less glamorous neighborhoods.  

The Apartment on Passy Street is a frenetic, incisive novel, steeped in irony and biting mockery. Moving between places and periods, it engages in dialogue with works of cinema, television, and literature, and leaps between stories of sexual awakening and major events in global history—all told through the eyes of the two protagonists: a sharp gaze of persistent otherness that challenges familiar narratives.  

Translation and Editing Team: Raji Bathish and Dafna Rosenblit

Cover artwork: Alireza Shojaian
Corps à Corps (2016)