The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story by Hanan Al-Shaykh, translated by Roger Allen (Pantheon, $24.95, 9780307378200/ 0307378209, August 25, 2009)

Hanan al-Shaykh received very little praise from her mother, Kamila, for all her accomplishments as journalist and novelist (The Story of Zahra, Beirut Blues). Instead, Kamila challenged her to write about Lebanese women like Kamila who had been exploited and oppressed simply because they were born female. Write about me, she argued, my story is better than anything else you've done.

Hanan eventually yielded to her mother's badgering. "I knew perfectly well why she wanted to tell me her story. She wanted forgiveness," she admits as she decides that Kamila should narrate the tale in her own voice with her rich recall of the hand life had dealt her. As irony would have it, Hanan still had to physically write the memoir: Kamila, no matter how lively and articulate, was illiterate.

The memoir starts fast and keeps on building. Kamila grew up penniless in a small village before moving to Beirut. She was sold by her father for 10 gold coins (a/k/a contracted in marriage) to her half-sister's widower when she was 11. She trained as a seamstress to fill the function and role of her dead half-sister in a marriage to her 32 year old brother-in-law when she was 14. She gave birth to her first daughter at age 15.

Despite marriage and childbirth, Kamila remained a romantic teenager dazzled by screen images. "Why couldn't I be like Raja in the film, someone who was loved and spoilt by everyone, instead of just a stone-bearing donkey?" she asks. A fighter and a rebel, she would not let her spirit be crushed by her stern, distant husband. She fell in love with another man and carried on a four-year clandestine affair until a showdown required that she divorce her husband and renounce all claims to her daughters, Fatima and Hanan.

Kamila's relentless battle to be her own person is on every page of this beautiful memoir of 50 years of love, betrayal, regret and guilt in a society that tried with all its might to suppress life forces like her. Near the end of her tale she confesses to Hanan, "You and your sister are two little jewels. And I threw you in the dust," and gains forgiveness. During her lifetime, much had changed in Lebanon--she saw women like her daughter Hanan make independent decisions, attend universities and have satisfying careers rather than be condemned to be stone-bearing donkeys. And on her death bed, the feisty, fun-loving Kamila still could proclaim, "How I regret all the lovely shoes I haven't yet worn."--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A vivid memoir of the changing status of women in contemporary Lebanon that also tells an affecting story of mother and daughter acceptance and reconciliation.