Munir Hachemi The Mulai review and information about the metafiction novel written by the Spanish writer. Fitzcarraldo Edidions will publish the English translation of El árbol viene written by Munir Hachemi, the author from Spain, on July 16, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.
Munir Hachemi The Mulai reviews and information
Whenever a review of The Mulai, the novel written by Brian Long and Munir Hachemi, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.
- “The Mulaiis a fascinating exploration of the many languages, fears and desires that give rise to a culture – and to the very experience of what we call literature. Munir Hachemi writes with a fresh, original voice that calls to mind Saer, Borges, Calvino, and the finest speculative fiction.” (Simón López Trujillo, author)
- “In The Mulai, Munir Hachemi conjures a mythic future history with all the heartbreak, mystery and absurdity of truth. With cheeky brilliance (and with translator Julia Sanches as a hovering ghost-in-the-machine presence), Hachemi co-opts the tropes of ethnography and intergalactic colonialism to imagine a queer, eschatological Eden, where culture is story and story is an alchemical compost pile of language decomposed and recomposed.” (Anne de Marcken, author)
The Mulai
- Author: Munir Hachemi (Spain)
- Book type: metafiction novel, Spanish novel
- Original: En árbol viene (2025)
- English translation: Julia Sanches
- Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- To be released: July 16, 2026
- Length: 176 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: £ 12.99
- Buying options >
Blurb of the second Munir Hachemi novel
An archaeologist travels to a distant planet to spend time among a mysterious community, a people who live in temperature-controlled domes, worship a deity called Dog, and repeat an elliptical phrase from which they draw their name: mulai, the tree comes. The descendants of a long-forgotten space mission, the Mulai have abandoned the social norms that once bound them to Earth.
Over centuries of isolation, their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, write, reproduce, bury their dead and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. As the archaeologist records his attempts to understand their world – a strange negative of our own – questions of translation, meaning-making and the ultimate precarity of civilization come to the fore.
Drawing on Borges, Le Guin and Calvino, The Mulai is a mind-bending work of metafiction whose interlocking puzzles resound with Munir Hachemi’s singularly playful and eclectic style.
Munir Hachemi was born in 1989 in Madrid. His career as a writer began with them selling their stories in the form of fanzines in the bars of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid. They are the author of Living Things (2018) and The Mulai (2023), and are also a translator from Chinese and English. In 2021, they appeared on Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list.
