Recommendations from our site
“Of all the books on the list, this is probably the most personally important to me. I read it when I was living and working in Cairo in the mid-nineties, and it was one of the first novels I read by an Arab woman writing in English. There’s a sense of movement between the Arab world and Britain, to this dull, cold, north of England university town—and I’d been to Durham University, so I could get all of that, and I could get the Cairo scenes too. It’s a large book, at almost 800 pages. But I remember living with it, walking around with it, and rushing back from work to continue reading it…It has been compared to George Eliot’s Middlemarch by Edward Said, probably because of its breadth, and how it covers the whole of the Arab world at a particular period in time. You’ve got the background of the 1967 war, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalism, you’ve got famous Arab musicians like Umm Kulthum, all against the story of a girl growing up and marrying the man she loves.” Read more...
Selma Dabbagh, Novelist
