Book review: A queen reclaims her voice in Saara El-Arifi’s historical epic ‘Cleopatra’

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.

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