Concept by TAP UAEConcept site by TAP Media House. The author, books and events are samples.
contact@tapmediahouse.comA novel by Lamees Sahel
In a shuttered house in Sharjah, a woman finds the account book her grandfather kept through the last pearling seasons, and a name on its final page that she cannot stop thinking about.
Lamees Sahel writes novels and essays about the Gulf coast. She lives in Sharjah.
About the authorThe novel begins on the night the family house is sold, with the one thing nobody wanted to keep.
From chapter one of The Pearl Ledger.
Advances, season of 1949
| Name | Advance | Returned |
|---|---|---|
| Khalfan, diver | Rs 40 | 12 |
| Obaid, diver | Rs 35 | 35 |
| Rashid, puller | Rs 20 | 6 |
| Rs 60 |
The last line has an amount and no name.
One
My grandfather kept two books. One was the Quran his mother had wrapped in green cloth, and the other was a ledger with a cracked spine that he would not let any of us open. When the house in Sharjah was finally sold, the second book was the only thing nobody wanted, so I took it.
It smelled of the cupboard it had lived in for forty years: camphor, dust, and something sweeter underneath, like dates left too long in a dish. The first page held a date in the old style and a list of names. Beside each name was a sum, and beside each sum a smaller sum, and beside that, in a different ink, a word I had to look up twice.
1
Lamees Sahel
The word was salaf. An advance. Money given to a diver’s family before the boat went out, to be paid back from whatever the sea returned.
I read the names aloud in my flat that night, with the air conditioner rattling and the lights of Al Majaz coming on across the water. Some of them I knew from weddings and funerals. Some I had never heard spoken in my life. By the third page I understood that I was not reading a record of what my family owned. I was reading a record of what was owed to us, and by whom, and for how long.
2
The Pearl Ledger
My mother said I should give it to the museum. My uncle said I should burn it. My cousin Hind, who had driven down from Ras Al Khaimah to help us empty the rooms, said nothing at all, and that was how I knew she had already read it.
‘There is a name on the last page,’ she told me later, on the phone, in the careful voice she kept for bad news. ‘Read the last page before you decide anything.’
I did not read the last page. Not that night, and not for eleven days. I want to be honest about that from the beginning, because everything that happened afterwards happened in those eleven days, while the ledger sat on my kitchen table under a bowl of oranges and I told myself I was too busy to open it.
End of the extract.
3
Three books in English, and The Pearl Ledger in Arabic. Choose one to see the details.
A woman inherits her grandfather’s pearling ledger and spends eleven days deciding whether to read its last page. A novel about debt and inheritance, and about the families who waited on the shore.
The Arabic edition, prepared with the author over a year of reading the novel aloud. A few scenes changed on the way, and the notebook has a piece about why.
Fourteen essays on heat, and on the shade people in the Gulf have made for themselves: wind towers, palm-frond arish houses, the bus shelters of Al Nahda, the long afternoon in a cousin’s majlis.
Nine stories about the people who rented rooms in one courtyard house near the Sharjah creek between 1971 and 2011: a tailor, two nurses, a radio announcer, and a family who never unpacked.
Lamees Sahel writes about the Gulf coast: the families who lived by it, the money that moved along it, and the houses they left when the work changed.
She grew up in Sharjah and spent twelve years as an archivist, cataloguing letters, deeds and account books given by families from the old pearling towns. Her first book, Saltwater Tenants, began with a single box of rent receipts.
She writes in English and works closely with her translators on the Arabic editions. The Pearl Ledger is her first novel.
Every archive has a shape, and the shape is mostly absence. When I worked with family papers, the boxes that reached us had already been edited by the people who packed them. The letters that embarrassed someone were gone. The receipts that proved something were kept.
The Pearl Ledger started with a book that had been kept whole, which is rarer than you would think.
The full piece opens on its own page on the live site.
I wrote The Pearl Ledger in English, mostly between five and eight in the morning, before the heat and the emails. Then I spent a year with my translator reading it aloud in Arabic, and found that some scenes only made sense in one of the two languages.
We kept both versions honest by arguing about every one of them.
The full piece opens on its own page on the live site.
June is when I reread. It is too hot to start anything new, so I go back to books I know well enough to open at any page. This year’s list has a whaling novel, two books of letters, a cookbook from Basra, and a slim book about tides that I have bought four times because I keep giving it away.
The full piece opens on its own page on the live site.
6Nov 2026
Reading and conversationSharjah
An evening reading from The Pearl Ledger, with a short talk on family papers from the pearling years.
21Nov 2026
Book club eveningDubai
An open discussion of The Pearl Ledger with readers. Seats are limited.
4Dec 2026
Writing from family historyAbu Dhabi
A university talk for students of literature and archives, with time for questions.
Festival and school invitations go through the contact form.
A letter each season with what I am reading, what I am writing and where I will be. Four a year at most.
Concept by TAP UAE
TAP Media House designs and builds websites for authors in the UAE. This sample shows what one can hold: the new book up front, a reading sample, every edition with a way to buy it, events, a mailing list, and a contact form that sorts rights, press and reader messages.
We build in English and Arabic.
Lamees Sahel is a fictional author created for this sample. The books, the excerpt, the events and the notebook were written for the demo.
Concept site by