Set in the sleepy Egyptian village of Muntaha during the late 1940s, this novel paints a vibrant portrait of rural life in Egypt. Between the turbulent events of 1948 and the final years of the British presence in Egypt, the village's inhabitants find themselves caught up against their will in the swirl of larger world events, although their daily lives and beliefs are grounded in the timeless nature of a rural past.
What was it like to live in Iraq before the earth-shaking events of the end of the twentieth century? The mid seventies to the late eighties witnessed Saddam Hussein's rise to power, the establishment of Kurdish autonomy in the north, and the Iraq-Iran war. It also brought an influx of oil wealth, following the 1973 war and the spike in oil prices, and a parallel influx of Arab talent, including many Egyptians, as the Egyptian left became disenchanted with Sadat. The massive migration also extended to workers and peasants, some of whom created an entire Egyptian village just outside Baghdad.We witness all of this and more through the eyes of an Egyptian woman married to an engineer working in Iraq. The narrator, who works for an Egyptian magazine's bureau in the Iraqi capital, has a behind-the-scenes view of what was really happening at a critical juncture in the history of the region. Moreover, she has a mystery to solve: an Iraqi woman from the marshes in the south of Iraq, who is also a communist journalist, has disappeared, and as the mystery unfolds we learn of her love for an older Egyptian Marxist journalist.This is Iraq before and beyond Saddam, Iraq as the Arabs knew it, in the lives of interesting people living in a vibrant country before the attempted annexation of Kuwait and the American invasion. This is the Iraq that was
In this prize-winning novel, Nahid is a woman determined to go on a journey of self discovery and understanding. As we accompany her in her sometimes delirious, sometimes lucid journey, we are given rare glimpses of the inner thoughts and feelings of a woman confronting questions of love and intimacy within and outside of marriage. It is a story of one woman's quest for liberation, not from a repressive society or a male-dominated world - that is easy and has been done many times before --but from self-imposed taboos that inhibit a woman's ability to find fulfillment and to confront the many imponderables surrounding sexuality, desire, and love. Stuck -- by conscious choice to keep up the genteel appearances of her middle-class family -- in a loveless marriage to Mustafa, the forty-something Nahid finds love and sex with novelist and journalist Omar -- himself trapped in a loveless, but not sexless, marriage to Maggie. Although their love story is at the very heart of the novel, we are given broad glimpses of the larger picture of the world outside through Nahid's work as an archaeologist and Omar's as a journalist. The novel was well received by women readers, critics, and reviewers and by a majority of the male audience, while a vociferous minority of male critics felt scandalized by it, finding it unseemly that such issues should be raised by a woman. Now English readers can judge for themselves.
