Mohamed Kheir

After seven years in prison, Warif is released to a changed Cairo. Freedom so far has been endless, inscrutable meetings with official-looking strangers, trying to get his job as a translator back. This new Cairo, busy with expats and bureaucrats, is proving disorienting: What is he supposed to make of these self-assured newcomers who are so certain of his obsolescence, his subjugation, his solitude? They seem happy to provide him with a salary, if he's willing to give up the work that gave his life meaning. As his encounters more-and-more resemble interrogations and the futility of trying to escape the system set against him threatens to suffocate him, Warif escapes into the vivid colors of the city, looking deeper and deeper into the food, the people, the buildings, and the flowers, until what's real blurs into fantasy.

There are shards of magic to be found on every page of this novel." --Omar El Akkad, author of American WarA struggling journalist named Seif is introduced to a former exile with an encyclopedic knowledge of Egypt's obscure, magical places. Together, as explorer and guide, they step into the fragmented, elusive world the Arab Spring left behind. They trek to an affluent neighborhood where giant corpse flowers rain from the sky. They join an anonymous crowd in the dark, hallucinating together before a bare cave wall. They descend a set of stairs to the spot along the Nile River where, it's been said, you can walk on water. But what begins as a fantastical excursion through a splintered nation quickly winds its way inward as Seif begins to piece together the trauma of his own past, including what happened to Alya, his lover with the remarkable ability to sing any sound: crashing waves, fluttering wings, a roaring inferno.Musical and parabolic, Slipping seeks nothing less than to accept the world in all its mystery. An innovative novel that searches for meaning within the haze of trauma, it generously portrays the overlooked miracles of everyday life, and attempts to reconcile past failures--both personal and societal--with a daunting future. Delicately translated from Arabic by Robin Moger, this is a profound introduction to the imagination of Mohamed Kheir, one of the most exciting writers working in Egypt today.