Aaliyah Saleh lives alone in her Beirut department, surrounded by stockpiles of
books. Godless, fatherless, childless and divorced, Aaliyad is her family's "unn
ecessary appendage". Every year, she translates a new favourite work into Arabic
, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that she has translated over her li
fetime have never been read or touched by anyone but her.
