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A gripping, deeply moving memoir of survival, education, and resistance. 2026 National Book Award Finalist

In 2013, seventeen-year-old Abdelrahman ElGendy was a budding student activist in Cairo. Two years after the January 25 revolution, hope for a free Egypt had dissipated; when that summer’s military coup unleashed unprecedented massacres of protesters, Abdelrahman didn’t hesitate—he joined the street movement.

His father, fearing for his son’s safety, accompanied him to a mass demonstration. But minutes after they arrived, they were swept up in a brutal police crackdown, and their lives were shattered. Crushed inside a holding cell, Abdelrahman first heard the words of the Arab world’s most enduring protest song, ‘Sawfa Nabqa Huna’ – We Will Remain Here.

He wondered: If no one wanted to remain behind bars, what was the ‘here’ they chose to inhabit? Abdelrahman would spend the next six years as a political prisoner chasing this Huna, shuffled, alongside his father, from jail cell, to pre-trial detention center, to The Scorpion, Egypt’s most infamous prison complex. As his body broke under the grind of incarceration with no end in sight, he turned to the only refuge left to him: the page. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering while imprisoned, read and wrote voraciously, and, through writing, bore witness.

In his remarkable debut, Abdelrahman offers not a promise of hope, but a provocation. When the very things that can save you – tenderness, family, friendship, language – are used against you, how can you find the courage to love? Huna is a reckoning with what it takes – and what it costs – to remain when erased, and of what endures beyond hope.