Captain Ni'mat's Last Battle

Captain Ni’mat, a reservist from the Egyptian army defeated by the Israelis in 1967, finds himself aging & idle, spending his days at a luxurious private club in Cairo with former comrades. One night, Captain Ni’mat has an exquisite, chilling dream: he sees pure beauty in the form of his Nubian valet. Awakened by these searing images, he slips into the hut where the young man sleeps. The vision of his naked body so deeply disturbs Captain Ni’mat that his monotonous existence is suddenly turned upside down.

Unbeknownst to his wife, he comes to know physical love with his valet. In a country where religious fundamentalism grows increasingly prevalent every day, this forbidden passion will lead him to the height of happiness, at least for a time.

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Mohamed Leftah was a writer & journalist born in Settat, Morocco, in 1946. He attended engineering school in Paris & then returned in 1972 to Morocco, where he became a literary critic for Le Matin du Sahara & Le Temps du Maroc. His novels include the critically acclaimed Demoiselles of Numidia (Other Press, 2023) & Captain Ni’mat’s Last Battle (Other Press, 2022). He died of cancer in 2008.

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Lara Vergnaud has translated over a dozen books from the French. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Grant for her translation of France, story of a childhood, by Zahia Rahmani, which was released by Yale University Press in 2016. She is the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize & was a finalist for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. Her forthcoming translations include works by Mohamed Leftah & Franck Bouysse. Her work has been featured in The Paris Review, Literary Hub, & the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.