e Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany's second novel is a bit of a curate's egg, or maybe a mullah's omelette: on the one hand it's a racy campus novel set among the Egyptian émigré community of the University of Illinois, while on the other...
This sweeping novel depicts the intertwined lives of an assortment of Egyptians-Muslims and Copts, northerners and southerners, men and women-as they begin to settle in Egypt's great second city, and explores how the Second World War, starting in...