The Tribe

The Tribe is a collection of three novellas portraying life in an extended Muslim Allawite Lebanese-Australian family, as seen by one of its youngest members. The first novella describes the family house in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria, and the three generations who live, often in some discord, in its rooms; the second details the marriage of a cousin, and the threatened appearance of an estranged branch of the family at the ceremony; the third rounds off the cycle with the death of the family matriarch, the boy’s grandmother.

Together they offer an intimate insight into a community negotiating the conflict between tradition and modernity, and the complex tribal affiliations of the extended family.