Wadi Al-Afareet; Sultan Al-Sajan (digital product)

The novel (Wadi Al-Afareet) of the genre of historical fantasy, the author Saud Al-Sajan presented many historical facts in the narrated story. And what is to be credited to the author is that these historical stories are diverse, which made the novel exciting, so the reader does not get bored while moving from one story to another. Brief literary critique: It is characterized by combining suspense and seriousness of the narrative content it addresses, as well as the ability to remove the differences between the historical and the imaginary so that the work appears as a construction of a narrative imagination rather than a historical novel. The novel relies in its structure on the frame story, which is interwoven with internal stories, a traditional storytelling form derived from major creative works, most notably One Thousand and One Nights. What the writer succeeded in is making the structure simple and uncomplicated, unlike many writers who take the frame story as a template for their works. The novel is considered experimental in its treatment of events and situations from the Islamic and global histories in this innovative way that preserves the literary quality of the text without falling into the pitfalls of historical narration. Also, the novel enjoys technical richness in handling time, and employing fantasy and myth. What deserves praise is the author's reliance on internal narrators to convey the literary message carried by the novel's content, without the writer himself intervening as an external narrator or otherwise, and thus the work is free from the author's dominance over his characters with his own ideas that directly direct the message, which makes the work fall into didacticism. 95 pages. Published in 1441 AH (2020 AD). Digital product.