Woman at Point Zero is a landmark 1975 novel by Egyptian writer and feminist Nawal El Saadawi. Based on a real encounter in Cairo’s Qanatir Prison, it tells the story of Firdaus, a woman on death row for murder, as she recounts her life of poverty, abuse and sex work. 

El Saadawi doesn’t aestheticise suffering, she writes it truly with spare prose. The novel interrogates patriarchy, religion, marriage, class and the economics of the female body without drifting into abstraction. It remains one of the most widely read works of Arab feminist literature.

If you read Assia Djebar, Tsitsi Dangarembga, or early Doris Lessing — this sits in that lineage of political clarity without rhetorical fog.