Jordanian writer Jalal Barjas has won this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for his novel “Notebooks of the Bookseller.” The novel is set in Jordan and Moscow between 1947 and 2019, and tells the story of Ibrahim, a bookseller and avid reader, who loses his stall and finds himself homeless. After suffering from schizophrenia, Ibrahim embarks on a crime spree, carrying out a series of thefts, robberies and ...