Throwing Sparks Novel

Throwing SparksNovel is a Saudi novel published in 2009 by Abdo Khal. It won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 'Booker' during its third session in 2010, making it the first Saudi novel to win the award. The novel has been translated into English and French.

Throwing Sparks was printed in six editions, the first of which was published by 'Manshurat al-Jamal' in 2009. The novel presents a bleak portrait of a world where humanity is concealed, and only evil, corruption, and crime are evident. The novel is structured around a two-part narrative and a concluding appendix, which the author has titled 'The First Threshold' and 'The Second Threshold'. Each part documents detailed confessions of two distinct phases of the protagonist's life, recounted using the technique of flashback. The narrator temporarily abandons the present narrative to delve into past events and narrate them.

In his confessions, the protagonist speaks of a life spent between the neighborhood and the palace, the only spatial framework employed by Khal in the narrative to signify two opposing and distinct worlds, representing the contradictions of life and the vastness of its disparities.

The novel revolves around a man called 'Tariq Fadel', who lives in Jeddah City. Over three decades, he spent his life between the neighborhood and the palace. He recounts his confessions split between the densely populated, poverty-stricken area he lived in, as its residents call it 'the pit' or 'hell', and the palace built by a wealthy man adjacent to the neighborhood. The vast area of the palace completely obscures the sea view from the poor inhabitants of the neighborhood who used to call it 'the paradise'. The narrative explores also the extremely cruel events between these two worlds.

Tariq entered the palace as a young man to serve his master, a wealthy magnate in the city. Unaware of the depths to which his work would lead him, his job was to carry out acts of torture and cruelty against individuals with previous enmities with the owner of the palace. These heinous tasks were performed at the direct command of his employer, who bore primary responsibility for the torturous acts committed in his presence. The master was a man of excessive wealth and corruption, and a tyrant who did not accept competition or deviation from his authority.

In the final chapter of his novel, Abdo Khal blurs the lines between reality and fiction by including an appendix titled 'The Isthmus'. In this appendix, he asserts that the novel's protagonist is a real person whom he encountered by chance in London during a family trip. Khal claims that the events depicted in the story are factual and were recounted by the protagonist during their meeting. To support his claims, Khal has appended a collection of news reports that corroborate the novel's events or related occurrences.