Recommendations from our site
“It spans a period of around ten years, starting before the revolution and ending after it. It’s told through the perspective of the central character, Layla, and follows her coming of age in the context of bourgeois Egyptian family life, which is shown to be simultaneously stultifying and oppressive for independent-minded women. Layla is beset on all sides by people who undermine her in different ways…Everything changes as Layla becomes involved with the revolutionary moment following 1952 when, to put it very simply, Nasser and his Free Officers’ movement overthrew the king and the vestiges of the British Empire, ushering in a moment of national rebirth for Egypt and the beginning of a truly post-colonial era.” Read more...
The Best 20th-Century Arab Novels
Raphael Cormack, Literary Scholar
