Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. To order Woman at Point Zero for £9.99 go to or call 03. As a first-person account, the book initially seems narrow in focus, but it builds to an all-encompassing and blood-curdling indictment of patriarchal society. Her most famous novel, Woman at Point Zero was published in Beirut in 1973. As Saadawi narrates from Firdaus’s perspective, every single man in her life seeks to abuse or exploit her based on her female identity. The searing narrative is rendered epic by the use of long repeated passages that make explicit the connections between the stages in Firdaus’s journey towards murder. Nawal El Saadawi ’s Woman at Point Zero tells the story of Firdaus an Egyptian woman on death row in the 1970s for killing a pimpwho suffers oppression and abuse from men for her entire life. Genitally mutilated as a child, Firdaus feels sexual desire as a distant memory, something once glimpsed, now only vaguely remembered. At the beginning of the novel, the author, Nawal El Saadawi, experiences feelings of loss and rejection upon learning that Firdaus refuses to speak to her.

The text has a highly visual quality, it’s an expressionist film in words: disembodied eyes loom over Firdaus at key moments in her life, representing intense emotion – fear, love. Proud and unbroken, in spite of a life of unremitting pain and repeated betrayals, she narrates her story to a female psychiatrist on the eve of her hanging. From her prison cell, Firdaus, sentenced to die for having killed a pimp in a Cairo street, tells of her life from village childhood to city prostitute. Forty years on it feels just as fresh, powerful and necessary as on the first day it appeared. 20 th-century African feminisms, under different names and descriptions, generally advocated a moderate approach to gender relations, refusing to exclude or stigmatize men. It was first published in Arabic in 1975 and in English in 1983, translated by Sherif Hetata. Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi, has been neglected by African feminist commentary, probably because of its radicalism. Z ed Books is reissuing Nawal El Saadawi’s classic feminist work.

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi