Valley of the Jinn; Sultan of the Guards

Available electronic version via Kindle Amazon https://a.co/d/5YyghLJ Also via Google Book https://2u.pw/AtP4e Novel (Valley of the Jinn) of the genre of historical fantasy, the author Saud Al-Sajan presented many historical facts in the novel. 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 the seriousness of the narrative contents 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 and not a historical novel. The novel relies on the frame story, which is interspersed with internal stories, a traditional narrative form derived from major creative works, foremost among them 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 experimental in its treatment of events and situations from Islamic and global history 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, employing fantasy and myth. What deserves praise is the writer's reliance on internal narrators to convey the literary message carried by the novel's contents, without interference from the writer himself in the form of 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 and make the work overly didactic. 95 pages. Published in 1441 AH (2020 AD). Available electronic version via Kindle Amazon https://a.co/79ssNDi