This chapter explores how authors use intertextuality and historical referentiality to develop Tunisian interpretations of the modern Arabic novel. Which sources do they allude to, and which aesthetics do they revisit? The chapter investigates how four contemporary authors interpret elements that characterized novelistic writing in the twentieth century. Each of them converses with writers who shaped precursors of the Tunisian novel today, from Bashir Khurayyif to Muhammad al-'Arusi al-Mitwi and from Mahmud al-Mas'adi to 'Ali al-Du'aji. The chapter reveals how literature serves as a tool of imagining the past, while simultaneously moving beyond it. On the backdrop of Tunisia's colonial experience, such practices contribute to decolonial perspectives of the country's past, present and future.