Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi (HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction | The Borough Press)

Saara El-Arifi’s Cleopatra cuts through centuries of rumor and legend to let Egypt’s most famous queen finally speak for herself. Forget the usual tales, El-Arifi pushes past the gossip and the myth-making. Here, Cleopatra isn’t just a symbol or a scandal. She’s a woman fighting to claim her own story while the world tries to pin her down as something else entirely.

We follow Cleopatra as she moves through a version of ancient Egypt that feels both lush and real, her path tangled with ambition, intellect, and the heavy weight of divine right. She starts out hemmed in by other people’s expectations, but as the story unfolds, you watch her carve out space for her own power. The people around her, family, loyalists, rivals, lovers, aren’t just background. Each of them brings out a new angle of Cleopatra’s character, their relationships with her crackling with loyalty, jealousy, hope, and betrayal. Politics and intimacy mix, never cleanly separated.

Big themes run through the novel: power, womanhood, the question of legacy, and who gets to define cultural identity. El-Arifi doesn’t shy away from challenging the sexist narratives that have trailed Cleopatra for centuries. She asks us to confront why we remember women the way we do, and what happens when someone takes back their own history. The book keeps circling this idea: stories aren’t just entertainment; they shape what’s real, and reclaiming them isn’t just important, it’s urgent.

El-Arifi’s prose has its own kind of magic. She writes with a poet’s touch but never loses momentum. Ancient Egypt doesn’t just sit prettily in the background; it pulses with color, scent, and sound. The tone swings from close and confessional to sweeping and grand, drawing you right into Cleopatra’s inner world. Memory, prophecy, reality, they all blur together, layering the narrative with a sense of mystery and fate. Sometimes the writing gets dense, but mostly it just adds richness and tension.

Reading Cleopatra feels intimate, like you’re in the queen’s private chambers, hearing secrets no one bothered to record. The world El-Arifi builds is beautiful and brutal, sacred and dangerous all at once. Unlike most historical fiction, this novel lets Cleopatra’s voice set the terms, modern, ancient, fiercely alive. 

If you love stories that rethink the past or you’ve followed El-Arifi before, this one hits hard. The book lingers, asking whose stories last, and why. You won’t shake that question off easily.

4/5