No souqs please, is Joumana Haddad's maxim as she introduces this collection of ten stories of cities in the Middle East. Haddad, a Lebanese author, deplores literature that reinforces stereotypes of a romantic Orient, and mosaics or minarets are scarce in Madinah - Arabic for city.

So, if like the Orient the concept of the Middle East too is a Western construct, is there anything Middle Eastern about Middle Eastern writing?

On first reading, the answer is no. There is good writing here, with moving evocations of loneliness. Gamal al-Ghitani's Midnight on the Outside tells of a young man moving to a bleak Egyptian city where he has no friends. In There's No Room for a Lover in this Cityby Yousef al-Mohaimeed, another young man lives in a room in Riyadh where his neighbour would keep driving rather than let the narrator see three fully veiled daughters get out of the car.

There is also longing for one's home, as in Nedim Gürsel's story about Istanbul, or sex, as in Haddad's Living it Up (and Down) in Beirut. But isolation, homesickness and sex are themes to be expected in literature about cities. It is human for isolated people to experience places intensely and for the displaced to miss home. If there is a theme that unites these stories, it is that which people associate with the Middle East far more readily than Oriental imagery: conflict.

Haddad focuses on recent flashpoints of Beirut, Ala Hlehel's The Passport is set in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, while Yitzhak Laor's Meningitis is about Israeli military life. Other stories are marked or overshadowed by war even if they do not directly address it.

What unites the Middle East, sadly, is fighting over its divisions, and if readers once observed these countries through an oriental veil, this collection will leave them staring down the barrel of a gun.

Madinah: City Stories from the Middle East edited by Joumana Haddad
Comma Press, £7.95 Buy the book

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