The Tribe

Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s path-breaking and prize-winning first novel, originally published in 2014, is presented in a new edition with an introduction by Dr Jumana Bayeh.

For the last three decades the representation of Arab-Australian Muslims has been coloured by media reports of sexual assault, drug-dealing, drive-by shootings and terrorist conspiracy. This has made it difficult to understand a community which plays an important role in contemporary Australian society. Here, in his first work of fiction, Michael Mohammed Ahmad offers a privileged introduction to the life and customs of ‘The Tribe’, members of a small Muslim sect who fled to Australia just before the civil war in Lebanon. His stories focus on the relationships between three generations of an extended family, the House of Adam, as seen by one of its youngest offspring, a child called Bani, at key moments in its development. Ahmad’s writing is aware of tradition, but its real power is in its simplicity and honesty, and the directness with which he conveys the emotional responses of his young narrator.

WINNER: Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist 2015
SHORTLISTED: Voss Literary Prize 2015
SHORTLISTED: Readings New Writing Award 2015
SHORTLISTED: NSW Premier’s Literary Award – UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing 2015

Ahmad is a writer who has an infinite appreciation of the social and cultural particularities that make up the cultural milieu he is writing about.
Ghassan Hage, Overland

Ahmad seeks to humanise, to give voice to those who exist only as types in the official imagination, in the ‘team’ version of Australia. And he does this in the best possible way – not by caricaturing or categorising, but by giving each creation their full humanity…Such writing as Michael Ahmad is producing is needed by people of conscience more than ever.
Angelo Koukakis, Sydney Review of Books

Ahmad tackles difficult subject matter with breathtaking honesty, gesturing towards a larger social canvas beyond the mind of a child that includes the struggle of migration, economic disadvantage, the difficulties of reconciling elements of the old and the new culture. Ahmad’s language is replete with lyricism, and a sense of wonder suffuses every page.
Judges’ comments, Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist