Mansour's Eyes

300 galleys targeting key media outlets and independent booksellers in Oakland, San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, and Houston

Promotion on Transit Books’s newsletter, website, and social media channels

Giveaways on Twitter, Instagram & Goodreads

Simultaneous print and e-book release, with e-book ISBN to be included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and whenever print ISBN is listed

Promotion on TB’s e-newsletter, website, and social media channels

A friend’s public execution triggers an ambitious look at the breakup of the modern Arab world.

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2020

"Capitalism and religious fundamentalism collide in Girod’s shimmering account of one man’s heresy and imminent execution."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Mansour al-Jazaïri is on his way to his public execution. As his faithful friend Hussein looks on, the crowd calls for his head. Gassouh! Gassouh! It is a time when age-old rituals play out amid skyscrapers and are replayed on smartphone screens in the air-conditioned corridors of shopping malls. Set over the course of a single day in the Saudi Arabian capital, Mansour’s Eyes weaves together several historical pasts: the time of Mansour’s great-grandfather, the Emir Abdelkader; that of Algerian independence; and that of another Mansour, Mansur Al-Hallaj, a Sufi mystic executed in 922. In this lyrical and ambitious novel, Ryad Girod looks at the post-Arab Spring world as its drive toward modernity threatens to sever its relationship with the ethos of Sufi thought and mysticism.