On the Greenwich Line

A desperately funny novel about the immigrant experience... Laugh out loud funny, the humour of [On the Greenwich Line] is an expression of a polite despair and a nihilism which recalls Albert Cossery.
- Richard Jacquemond, LE MONDE DES LIVRES

Shady Lewis makes fun of everything and everyone with great humanity: we become attached to these characters who are more lost than crazy, who do what they can keep going. Lewis, with scathing humour and a healthy lightness of touch, examines everything: from the god Khnum to Margaret Thatcher via Karl Marx, freedom of expression, Facebook, romantic breakups, colonization, identity and religious tensions - nothing escapes his acerbic and lucid gaze. A delicious tragicomic novel about contemporary society.
- Nina Chastel, ORIENT XXI

Set between the Arab world and Europe, this novel is distinguished by its impertinent, sometimes ironically loving, style, and imbued with a typically British humor.
- Shathil Nawaf Taqa, THE COUNTER

Shady Lewis's novel is the equivalent of an injection of intellectual vitamins. To be taken without moderation!
- Damien Aubel, TRANSFUGE

A brilliant satirical novel.
- Muriel Steinmetz, L'HUMANITE

A novel where the burlesque rubs shoulders with the tragic.
- Laurent Pfaadt, HEBDOSCOPE


On the Greenwich Line is both deeply despairing, and perfectly funny and joyful.
- Hassina Mechai, MIDDLE EAST EYE

This introspective novel delights with its finesse and depth, and invites us to look at reality from the author's sensitive perspective. In painfully beautiful, funny and tragic prose, Shady Lewis skilfully and accurately expresses the difficulty of being... excluded and stigmatized because of their difference.
- Nadia Leila Aissaoui, L'ORIENT LITTERAIRE

The absurdities of everyday life are intertwined with memories of childhood, as the Middle Eastern immigrant is confronted with Western prejudices. [The book is] bitingly funny, and the Egyptians as well as the English are torn to pieces. You will not be bored On the Greenwich Line.
- Frederique Roussel, LIBERATION

The final scene of the novel is a firework of darkly absurd humor. This ease in marrying sentiment and irony is the mark of Shady Lewis's great mastery. On the Greenwich Line is his first novel translated from Arabic - we await the next one.
- Lisbeth Koutchoumoff, LE TEMPS